Rails - May 2006 - Converting from UTF8 to ISO-8859-1 encoding

Please help,

   I have followed the rails wiki to convert my rails application to use 
UTF-8:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings

   I am able to succesfully cut and paste Unicode characters from other 
page, successfully store and display unicode characters.

   However, my client actually wants ISO-8859-1 encoding, which I''m 
coming to realize is somehow different then UTF8.  Having UTF8 allows me 
to use alot of the ISO-8859-1 strings, but not all of them.

   So my questions are:

1. What is the difference?

2. How do I configure my application for ISO-8859-1?  I tried just 
changing the content-type, but there must be more to that.

   Thanks in advance,

-Gregg

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Gregg Pollack <patched@...> writes:
> 
>    I have followed the rails wiki to convert my rails application to use 
> UTF-8:
> 
> http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings
> 
...
> 
>    However, my client actually wants ISO-8859-1 encoding, which
I''m
> coming to realize is somehow different then UTF8.  Having UTF8 allows me 
> to use alot of the ISO-8859-1 strings, but not all of them.
Could you give us some exemple of string in ISO-8859-1 that don''t
support UTF-8,
I personnaly don''t so any until here. From my own I do web sites in
different
languages, french, english, slovak and actually use UTF-8 all the time, I
didn''t
have any problem until now, except first to find how to save my files in UTF-8,
radrails do that really easely.
>    So my questions are:
> 
> 1. What is the difference?
 
I personaly past some good hours looking at it and find this ressource useful
for me :

http://www.fileformat.info/
> 2. How do I configure my application for ISO-8859-1?  I tried just 
> changing the content-type, but there must be more to that.
I just get a really fast look to the wiki page you give up and I think you just
might put your application as it was before you did that.

About the Content-Type, this is only gona inform the browser about the encoding
of your page, so if your page is not encoded with the same charset it will not
work properly.
>    Thanks in advance,
> 
> -Gregg
> 
Good luck with charsets,
-- 
  S?b

>
> 1. What is the difference?
>   
You definitely should read 
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html titled "The Absolute 
Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About 
Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)"

Regards,
      Erik.