Converting from UTF8 to ISO-8859-1 encoding

Please help,

I have followed the rails wiki to convert my rails application to use
UTF-8:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings

I am able to succesfully cut and paste Unicode characters from other
page, successfully store and display unicode characters.

However, my client actually wants ISO-8859-1 encoding, which I’m
coming to realize is somehow different then UTF8. Having UTF8 allows me
to use alot of the ISO-8859-1 strings, but not all of them.

So my questions are:

  1. What is the difference?

  2. How do I configure my application for ISO-8859-1? I tried just
    changing the content-type, but there must be more to that.

    Thanks in advance,

-Gregg

Gregg P. <patched@…> writes:

I have followed the rails wiki to convert my rails application to use
UTF-8:

Peak Obsession

However, my client actually wants ISO-8859-1 encoding, which I’m
coming to realize is somehow different then UTF8. Having UTF8 allows me
to use alot of the ISO-8859-1 strings, but not all of them.

Could you give us some exemple of string in ISO-8859-1 that don’t
support UTF-8,
I personnaly don’t so any until here. From my own I do web sites in
different
languages, french, english, slovak and actually use UTF-8 all the time,
I didn’t
have any problem until now, except first to find how to save my files in
UTF-8,
radrails do that really easely.

So my questions are:

  1. What is the difference?

I personaly past some good hours looking at it and find this ressource
useful
for me :

  1. How do I configure my application for ISO-8859-1? I tried just
    changing the content-type, but there must be more to that.

I just get a really fast look to the wiki page you give up and I think
you just
might put your application as it was before you did that.

About the Content-Type, this is only gona inform the browser about the
encoding
of your page, so if your page is not encoded with the same charset it
will not
work properly.

Thanks in advance,

-Gregg

Good luck with charsets,

Séb

  1. What is the difference?

You definitely should read
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) – Joel on Software titled “The Absolute
Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About
Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)”

Regards,
Erik.