# Codepage 850 character set **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [November 25, 2005, 10:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/codepage-850-character-set/48866 "2005-11-25T22:10:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dsmorey](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/a88e57/32.png) [@dsmorey](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dsmorey)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2005, 10:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/codepage-850-character-set/48866/1 "2005-11-25T22:10:18Z")
Can anybody tell me how to read this information with Ruby? I received a file encoded with the Codepage 850 character set. Vim opens the file and reads the characters like this… \<90\>lodie The \<90\> should be a codepage 850 character \220. I am however able to open this file in Emacs and the character actually shows \220, and actually equals only one character. Here’s what it looks like in Emacs… \220lodie So, I’m almost positive the client is sending me the file correctly, and it’s correctly encoded in Codepage 850 character set. However, how do I use Ruby to process this file? When I loop through the characters of the word in question, Ruby is counting the character as 2 characters, even though Emacs shows it as one when I cursor over it. When I open the file and read the above string in ruby using this code… p.each\_byte do |c| print c, ’ ’ end I get this output… 194 144 108 111 100 105 101 You’ll notice there are 7 characters (bytes) there, however, Emacs only comes out with 6, the \220 being one of them. And I’m close to certain that the 194 and 144 should be the first character, but not sure how to get it to come out that way. What I need to do is be able to read this information in (using Ruby), and insert into a mysql table, but so far I’m not even sure how to read this information in Ruby. Thanks for any help you can offer.