# Problems with Character Set

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-character-set/111432>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [August 7, 2007, 9:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-character-set/111432 "2007-08-07T09:34:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![laurent](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/ce7236/32.png) [@laurent](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/laurent)\
**Post date:** [August 7, 2007, 9:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/problems-with-character-set/111432/1 "2007-08-07T09:34:10Z")

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We currently develop a kind of Portal, like a webtop…all the  
navigation is done through Ajax requests  
Initially, all the source files for the project are stored in a  
Subversion repository : the container has an UTF-8 character set.  
Initially our database, Oracle, was positionned to UTF 8 .  
Recently , our administrator moved the data to another Oracle instance  
in ISO 8859-15.

When playing the application, all the words with accents are not well  
rendered in our browser.

First, we put a pre filter for all incoming params (sent through a  
form\_remote\_tag), converting them from utf-8 to iso 8859 15  
Our problem now is output.  
As Prototype only supports UTF 8, my idea was to convert all the  
source files to ISO (as the database) then create a post filter to  
convert all the content to UTF 8 (as we would do to gzip output).

Another idea could be to convert all the data to UTF8, coming from the  
database (iso), through find methods from our models, or custom SQL  
queries.  
Then , we could do the mix with partials, left in UTF 8 in the  
repository

What could be the best approach? (if you think like me 'leave the  
database in UTF8, please don’t reply 😉 we couldn’t…this database is  
a legacy database, and other older client server application based on  
it need the ISO encoding )

Laurent