Rails: How to display Umlauts / Special characters with ultrasphinx and aspell?

Question

Hi,

I'm using Ultrasphinx for fulltext search, combined with aspell to provide the user with corrections. When I use the german dictionary and enter any Umlaut (öäü)

Ultrasphinx::Spell.correct(@search.query)

always returns a correction, even when the word is spelled correctly. Also the Umlauts are replaced with ? in the console and with strange characters. So "Lohnerhöhung" becomes 'Lohnerh�hung'.

Anyone had this problem before and knows a solution? Thanks!