# Broken Umlauts (ÄÖÜäöüß) since Update on Rails 1.2.1

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/broken-umlauts-a-a-aoea-a-a-ay-since-update-on-rails-1-2-1/82921>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 22, 2007, 1:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/broken-umlauts-a-a-aoea-a-a-ay-since-update-on-rails-1-2-1/82921 "2007-01-22T13:21:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mail2go](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mail2go](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mail2go)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 1:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/broken-umlauts-a-a-aoea-a-a-ay-since-update-on-rails-1-2-1/82921/1 "2007-01-22T13:21:35Z")

</div>

Dear group-members,

I´m a little frustrated, since I have updated on Rails 1.2.1:

My application uses some tables from a MySQL database encoded in UTF-8.  
With Rails 1.1.8, I had no problems with displaying German Umlauts  
(ÄÖÜäöüß) in views and forms, all went well without the need to  
worry about charsets and encoding.

Since yesterday, my browsers (Safari, Firefox) only display little  
question marks instead of the afore mentioned characters.

What will I have to do, to regain the proper display of Umlauts?

Any help is very appreciated

Tom

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mail2go](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@mail2go](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mail2go)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 11:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/broken-umlauts-a-a-aoea-a-a-ay-since-update-on-rails-1-2-1/82921/2 "2007-02-16T23:12:20Z")

</div>

I’m having the same problem with other extended-latin characters.  
They’re correctly stored in my MySQL DB as utf-8, but my Rails setup  
seems insistent on sending them to the browser in iso-8859-1, which is  
unfortunate since they’re in utf-8 pages. The page is correctly set  
for utf-8 encoding, the browser thinks it’s utf8, but the actual bytes  
coming from my Mongrel server are a iso-8859-1 stream.

The odd thing about this is that the encoding is fine (in utf-8) if I  
run the Rails app on my local machine (OS X), but when I run it on my  
server (Ubuntu), the characters get converted to iso-8859-1. They  
both hit the same DB.

Thanks for any help or pointers!  
-Dan