# What about charset? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [May 5, 2010, 4:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-about-charset/188056 "2010-05-05T04:04:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![nax](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/f07891/32.png) [@nax](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nax)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2010, 4:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-about-charset/188056/1 "2010-05-05T04:04:16Z")
Hi! I have a ruby program wich take some information from a .txt file, and copy it to a sqlite3 table. But the text is in ASCII-8BIT charset, so when I select the data from the table, it doesn’t return the right characters. What can I do? Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![nax](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/f07891/32.png) [@nax](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nax)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2010, 9:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-about-charset/188056/2 "2010-05-05T21:11:04Z")
Noé Alejandro wrote: > I have a ruby program wich take some information from a .txt file, and > copy it to a sqlite3 table. But the text is in ASCII-8BIT charset, so > when I select the data from the table, it doesn’t return the right > characters. What can I do? Show your code, and also which exact versions of ruby, ruby-sqlite3 and operating system you are using. Are you sure it doesn’t “return the right characters”? How do you know? Use str.bytes.to\_a to be sure, which will show you the actual byte codes, and compare this str.bytes.to\_a for the strings you put into the database. Any data you put into sqlite3 should be returned the same. The string you get back from sqlite3 might be tagged with the wrong encoding (in ruby 1.9), but it should at least be the same string of bytes. Furthermore the encoding tag shouldn’t affect how they are displayed, at least if you’re using a regular “puts” to write them out, and haven’t started messing with external encoding settings.