# CVS from Excel Encoding issue

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cvs-from-excel-encoding-issue/184018>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [February 23, 2010, 9:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cvs-from-excel-encoding-issue/184018 "2010-02-23T21:39:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![homerlex](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/bcef8e/32.png) [@homerlex](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homerlex)\
**Post date:** [February 23, 2010, 9:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cvs-from-excel-encoding-issue/184018/1 "2010-02-23T21:39:25Z")

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Using Ruby 1.8 (for Rails 2.3.5)

I have a cvs file that was exported from an Excel file.

Some of the text contains characters like “Test in quotes” (I think  
these are smart quotes)

I can properly change this to UTF-8 via:

Iconv.conv(“utf-8”, “cp1251”, text)

Other text contains text like spanish characters like Señora. I can  
properly change this to UTF-8 like this:

Iconv.conv(“utf-8”, “iso-8859-1”, text)

However I cannot figure out how to get some text that has both types of  
characters like this:

“Test in quotes” Señora

If I don’t get these properly into utf-8 they do not persist properly in  
mysql (they appear as ?)

Any ideas? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![homerlex](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/bcef8e/32.png) [@homerlex](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/homerlex)\
**Post date:** [February 26, 2010, 3:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/cvs-from-excel-encoding-issue/184018/2 "2010-02-26T15:08:36Z")

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Any encoding experts out there?