# csv/Rails 3/ruby 1.9.2p0/mysql encoding problem **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [September 15, 2010, 11:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/csv-rails-3-ruby-1-9-2p0-mysql-encoding-problem/195054 "2010-09-15T23:01:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![paul](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bbe5ce/32.png) [@paul](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/paul)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2010, 11:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/csv-rails-3-ruby-1-9-2p0-mysql-encoding-problem/195054/1 "2010-09-15T23:01:28Z")
I’m having an encoding problem, even though I’m attempting to have all my data always be in utf-8. Here’s the path the data takes: I have a CSV file that I believe is in utf-8, because I’m looking at it in a hex editor. One of the words is: 64 65 62 74 6F 72 E2 80 99 73 which translates to: debtor‚Äôs [that is, it contains a smart apostrophe] Now, I’m reading that string in using: require ‘csv’ CSV.foreach(fname, :encoding =\> ‘u’) do |row| Then I’m just storing that string using the standard ActiveRecord method. In mysql, when I do “show table status;”, I get “utf8\_unicode\_ci” as the encoding for all the tables. When I try to display that data in a browser, however, I get a 500 error with the message: “incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8” In the header of my page, I see: Content-Type text/html; charset=UTF-8 I don’t know where else to look. How can I tell what exactly is stored in the database? If I go into mysql and query, I get a single question mark in place of the character, but I don’t know if that is caused by a translation after the fact. In other words, I’ve ssh’d to the centos machine, started mysql and did a select. I get: debtor?s (Note: the page works correctly on my OS X development machine, using Ruby 1.8.7, so that is making debugging more challenging.) ---
**Author:** ![paul](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bbe5ce/32.png) [@paul](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/paul)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2010, 11:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/csv-rails-3-ruby-1-9-2p0-mysql-encoding-problem/195054/2 "2010-09-15T23:33:05Z")
I have a little more info: I did a mysqldump and looked at that in my text editor and I see that the word appears to be encoded correctly in mysql, at least after being run through mysqldump. It still looks like: 64 65 62 74 6F 72 E2 80 99 73, i.e. “debtor‚Äôs”