# Diacritics automatically transformed to ASCII?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/diacritics-automatically-transformed-to-ascii/172111>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 15, 2009, 12:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/diacritics-automatically-transformed-to-ascii/172111 "2009-07-15T00:20:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jimmyz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/e68b1a/32.png) [@jimmyz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jimmyz)\
**Post date:** [July 15, 2009, 12:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/diacritics-automatically-transformed-to-ascii/172111/1 "2009-07-15T00:20:57Z")

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I’m experiencing a crazy problem where diacritics (ü,é,á) are  
automatically being transformed to ASCII (u,e,a) in my ActiveRecord  
objects. I know see that the data is properly encoded (UTF-8) in the  
DB, but when put into the ActiveRecord object, the diacritics are  
gone.

I can’t figure out where this transformation is happening. It seems it  
could be happening anywhere in the rails stack. Has anyone ever seen  
this?

We’re running an Oracle DB, Ubuntu, Ruby 1.8.6 patchlevel 111, and  
Rails 2.3.2.

What other information might be useful to find the problem?