# Trying to understand unicode character entry, goes into postgres DB backing rails, saved to yaml as **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [January 5, 2008, 9:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/trying-to-understand-unicode-character-entry-goes-into-postgres-db-backing-rails-saved-to-yaml-as/125124 "2008-01-05T21:14:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Steven\_GSHarms](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/2bfe46/32.png) [@Steven\_GSHarms](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Steven_GSHarms)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2008, 9:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/trying-to-understand-unicode-character-entry-goes-into-postgres-db-backing-rails-saved-to-yaml-as/125124/1 "2008-01-05T21:14:59Z")
Examine the Unicode standard’s code page collection for “Latin small letter a with macron”. Nets U0100.pdf “Latin small letter a with macron” appears on chart as 0101. This is a hexidemial number which points to U+0101 as its code point. Converting 0101 to decimal gets you 257, this is the same as the HTML entity code. HTML code point is 257. That is &257; gives you &257; != 325. OK, so I can link this guy back to the Unicode source. But here’s the question, what’s up with the two broken values. Put &257; character into a view via Rails that is back-ended by a PostGres database. Using script/console, write the collection of models that contain this accented character to a YAML file. “Latin small letter a with macron” is stored in a YAML dump of accented charcters as: \xC4\x81 Hm, OK that’s a start. Somehow 0101 or 257 is linked to C4 81 Let’s convert those two to decimal and see if correlation becomes clear ( I know, BTW, the database that holds that entry is in UTF-8). C4: 196 81: 129 196+129=325 != 0101. Hm, look at documentation. Be stumped. Send mail to mailing lists for help.