I'm having trouble when I write accented characters into HTML files;  
though the accents appear properly in my terminal, they are badly  
"messed up" in the HTML output. CGI.escape doesn't fix the problem,  
because these are not "special" characters line < or >, but simply  
accented e's, o's, etc. I'm assuming the problem has something to do  
with a character set type mismatch between the file Ruby is writing  
and what the browser (Firefox) expects, but I'm at a loss as to how to  
correct it.

Any advice most appreciated,
Thanks,
Ken