Ryan Smith wrote: >> The first is not valid UTF-8. I suppose it might be UTF-16: U+A3A4 or >> U+A4A3 depending on little or big-endian. Or it could be some older >> proprietary Asian encoding. > > [Ryan] How to correct this (to UTF-8), it is a English XP Pro with PRC > as system locale. Sorry, I have no idea. Are you sure that \xa3\xa4 correponds exactly to that one character? Is the rest of the encoding variable length or fixed length? (e.g. are all characters two bytes long, even a western letter "A"?) Questions about Microsoft operating systems and what encodings they use really belong in a Microsoft users' forum, as it's not anything to do with Ruby. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.