Best encoding/charset for rails ecommerce site?

Rails
1

Normally, I’d just use UTF-8 but the more I read about ruby, the more
confused I am about selecting the most trouble-free encoding.

I’m using ruby 1.8.2, rails 1.1.2, postgresql 7.4.7 on Debian stable.

The website is in English and will sell products to U.S. and Canadian
customers so it needs to support special characters found in Spanish and
French names.

Which of these 3 encodings would be a good choice for the above setup?

a. UTF-8
b. ISO-8859-1
c. ISO-8859-15
NOTE: Windows-1252 is not supported by postgresql 7.4.7.

I don’t mind using any of the above 3–I just need help choosing one
that causes the fewest problems with Ruby and Rails (and integration
with PayPal).

2

On 11-jun-2006, at 3:04, Jim S. wrote:

a. UTF-8

There really is no b. You can turn to a plugin of mine that shouldn’t
do as much breakage anymore, as long as you use the “u”
or “chars” accessors. When you have to interface with other services
just convert to their native charset.

–
Julian ‘Julik’ Tarkhanov
please send all personal mail to
me at julik.nl