# Re: Newbie question: Working with iso-8859-1 files in Ruby

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-newbie-question-working-with-iso-8859-1-files-in-ruby/100305>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [July 28, 2006, 10:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-newbie-question-working-with-iso-8859-1-files-in-ruby/100305 "2006-07-28T10:28:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2006, 10:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-newbie-question-working-with-iso-8859-1-files-in-ruby/100305/1 "2006-07-28T10:28:52Z")

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Dear Peter,

there have been lengthy discussions about Unicode and Ruby on this  
list.  
I remember responding to an upcase/downcase question here:

\_[http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/183176\_](http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/183176_)  
([http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/183176](http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/183176))

You can do character encoding conversions using iconv, which is  
part of Ruby. There is documentation and examples available  
here:

\_[http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/iconv/rdoc/index.html\_](http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/iconv/rdoc/index.html_)  
([http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/iconv/rdoc/index.html](http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/iconv/rdoc/index.html))

Best regards,

Axel