# Utf-8 htmlentities,decode keeps switching to ascii-8bit
**URL:** \
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 31, 2010, 3:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/utf-8-htmlentities-decode-keeps-switching-to-ascii-8bit/186095 "2010-03-31T15:13:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@noxx000](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/noxx000)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2010, 3:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/utf-8-htmlentities-decode-keeps-switching-to-ascii-8bit/186095/1 "2010-03-31T15:13:01Z")
Hi there,
it’s not really rubyonrails but because it fits into the web-development
I think I’m in the right forum.
I’m trying to decode a string I read from an online xml-file and compare
it to another, locally stored one.
The locally stored string is:
p localstring #=\> “~St0rm€lite~”
p localstring.encoding #=\> #Encoding:UTF-8
The xml-file is saved as utf-8 and was read via HPricot.
p remotestring #=\> “~St0rm€lite~”
p remotestring.encoding #=\> #Encoding:UTF-8
Now I want to decode the remote string. To do this I’m using
htmlentities4.2.0 installed via gem, however it breaks the string
completely:
require ‘htmlentities’
htmldecoder = HTMLEntities.new
p htmldecoder.decode(remotestring) #=\> “~St0rm\xE2\x82\xAClite~”
p htmldecoder.decode(remotestring).encoding #=\> #Encoding:ASCII-8BIT
I’m trying to fix this the past 3-4 days but I didn’t find a solution.
I tried to convert it again to utf-8 but this make the string getting
even worser.
Also converting the local-string to ASCII-8BIT fails.
I looked up my system configuration:
My shell is running as UTF-8, also I installed ‘locales’:
p Locale.current #=\> [#\]
Is there any other settings I need to look up and configure? If I try
the script on another computer I get the right results but here it keeps
switching to ASCII-8BIT.
My Ruby version is 1.9
I would be happy if someone could help me.