# How to display ë, ä, á, ... in view

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-display-a-a-a-in-view/49951>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 10, 2005, 9:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-display-a-a-a-in-view/49951 "2005-12-10T21:44:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/aca169/32.png) [@nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nicksnels)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2005, 9:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-display-a-a-a-in-view/49951/1 "2005-12-10T21:44:52Z")

</div>

Hi,

I’m trying to at a select box to my page like so:

\<%= select(‘company’, ‘country’, [[‘België’, ‘BE’],  
[‘Nederland’, ‘NL’]]) %\>

But the ë in België is displayed as ? in Firefox and as || in IE5.

I have already placed some html code at the top of the page:

\<%= @title %\> 

But that doesn’t solve the problem. Anybody managed to solve it? All  
help is welcome. Thanks.

Kind regards,

Nick

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/aca169/32.png) [@nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nicksnels)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2005, 10:27pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-display-a-a-a-in-view/49951/2 "2005-12-10T22:27:23Z")

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nicksnels wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I’m trying to at a select box to my page like so:
> 
> \<%= select(‘company’, ‘country’, [[‘België’, ‘BE’],  
> [‘Nederland’, ‘NL’]]) %\>
> 
> But the ë in België is displayed as ? in Firefox and as || in IE5.

Make sure your editor saves the file in UTF-8 charset.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/aca169/32.png) [@nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nicksnels)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2005, 10:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-display-a-a-a-in-view/49951/3 "2005-12-10T22:40:28Z")

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Hi Andreas,

changed editor settings to UTF-8 and it worked magically! Thanks!!

Nick

andreas wrote:

> nicksnels wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I’m trying to at a select box to my page like so:
> > 
> > \<%= select(‘company’, ‘country’, [[‘België’, ‘BE’],  
> > [‘Nederland’, ‘NL’]]) %\>
> > 
> > But the ë in België is displayed as ? in Firefox and as || in IE5.
> 
> Make sure your editor saves the file in UTF-8 charset.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/aca169/32.png) [@nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nicksnels)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2005, 11:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-display-a-a-a-in-view/49951/4 "2005-12-10T23:03:55Z")

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Nick S. escribió:

> Kind regards,
> 
> Nick

see this:

[http://www.cookwood.com/html/extras/entities.html](http://www.cookwood.com/html/extras/entities.html)

bye

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/aca169/32.png) [@nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nicksnels)\
**Post date:** [December 12, 2005, 11:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-display-a-a-a-in-view/49951/5 "2005-12-12T11:32:08Z")

</div>

hey,

read this [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails/33858](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails/33858)  
this is how i solved my problem

cuz i also export to pdf and excel

if i used utf8:  
-the website OK  
-export pdfs and excels NOT OK

if i used iso-8859-1:  
-the website NOT OK  
-export pdfs and excels OK

so i set the charset for each def in all my controllers, this worked for  
me.

Nick.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/aca169/32.png) [@nicksnels](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nicksnels)\
**Post date:** [December 12, 2005, 11:56am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-display-a-a-a-in-view/49951/6 "2005-12-12T11:56:11Z")

</div>

I’m not a RoR guru, but a fact is when using:

(so charset “ISO-8859-15”) in your HTML files there’s no problem  
displaying  
chars like that, in my case pulled straight from a mysql db. (done with  
a  
perl script). I imagine this works as well for rails but you have to  
figure  
out what (read: where) to tell Rails.

Regards,

Gerard.

On Monday 12 December 2005 11:26, Brutyn N. tried to type something  
like:

> * * *
> 
> Rails mailing list  
> removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid  
> [http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails](http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails)

–  
$biz = [http://www.gp-net.nl](http://www.gp-net.nl) ;  
$fun = [http://www.mrmental.com](http://www.mrmental.com) ;  
~  
~  
:wq!