Thanks a lot for your help. I thought I will be going mad with this. I 
thought it had something to do with ruby being C based (I saw something 
on the internet about the difference between Python and JPython and the 
accented characters were encoded in UTF-8 and not html escaped).

What if the end rendering engine is not a browser (I checked and you're 
absolutely right, it does work in a browser)? How to get true UTF-8 
encoded characters instead of HTML escaped ones? I am using builder to 
generate XML files from the data I get.

Thanks a lot for your explanation (it really did enlighten me) and your 
help.

Jamal

Konrad Meyer wrote:
> Quoth Jamal Bengeloun:
>> characters into utf-8
>> 
>> ...
>> 
>> Does someone have an explanation?
>> 
>> Does anyone know how to get those characters into the final xml files?
>> 
>> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>> 
>> Jamal
> 
>   In short, you're asking what the difference between "\303\251", "é",
> and "‚" are.
> 
>   The first is an octal sequence embedded in a string (it happens to be 
> the
> same as utf-8 'é'). The second is also utf-8 'é'. These two are the same
> string ("\303\251" == "é"). The last, '‚' is the html-escaped 
> notation
> for a 'é' (I'm trusting your email for the correct number here). That 
> is,
> literally "‚" != "é", but they should render the same to a browser
> capable of displaying utf-8.
> 
> HTH,

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