# Supporting iso-8859-1

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/supporting-iso-8859-1/119476>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [November 7, 2007, 10:05am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/supporting-iso-8859-1/119476 "2007-11-07T10:05:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![michal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/34f0e0/32.png) [@michal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/michal)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2007, 10:05am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/supporting-iso-8859-1/119476/1 "2007-11-07T10:05:28Z")

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hi guys,  
i want to display special characters in my view (german umlaute  
ä,ü,…). Can anyone tell me how to do this.

1. when i put a “ü” into my view it results in (using ü instead  
works fine, but i want to use it directly) …

NoMethodError in Home#index  
Showing app/views/home/index.rhtml where line # raised:

You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it!  
You might have expected an instance of Array.  
The error occurred while evaluating nil.empty?

1. when i use an array within the “select” helper the umlaute are  
rendered with a question-mark

thx for your help

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![michal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/34f0e0/32.png) [@michal](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/michal)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2007, 12:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/supporting-iso-8859-1/119476/2 "2007-11-07T12:11:18Z")

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sorry guys i have found the problem.  
i need to save the files as UTF-8 then it works correctly.

is it safe to store all the files with utf-8 encoding?