How to set the mechanize page encoding?

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to get a page with an ISO-8859-1 encoding clicking on a link, so the code is similar to this:

page_result = page.link_with( :text => 'link_text' ).click

So far I get the result with a wrong encoding, so I see characters like:

'T�tulo:' instead of 'Título:'

I've tried several approaches, including:

• Stating the encoding in the first request using the agent like:

  @page_search = @agent.get(
    :url => 'http://www.server.com',
    :headers => { 'Accept-Charset' => 'ISO-8859-1' } )
  

• Stating the encoding for the page itself

    page_result.encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'
  

But I must be doing something wrong: a simple puts always show the wrong characters.

Do you know how to state the encoding?

Thanks in advance,

Added: Executable example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'

WWW::Mechanize::Util::CODE_DIC[:SJIS] = "ISO-8859-1"

@agent = WWW::Mechanize.new

@page = @agent.get(
  :url => 'http://www.mcu.es/webISBN/tituloSimpleFilter.do?cache=init&layout=busquedaisbn&language=es',
  :headers => { 'Accept-Charset' => 'utf-8' } )

puts @page.body

Answer 1

Yeah, Mechanize will try to detect the encoding itself (using the NKF core Ruby library) to guess the encoding) and sometimes fails.

Maybe this might help:
WWW::Mechanize::Util::CODE_DIC[:SJIS] = "ISO-8859-1"

I'm not too sure about the exact syntax, but I think the CODE_DICT Hash might be a good place to look :)
I had a similar problem a while back.

Answer 2

Sorry, it was my mistake: I come from a Java background and there strings are internally converted to utf-16. I forgot Ruby doesn't do it. Mechanize was recovering the page flawlessly, but I needed to convert the data via iconv.

Mental note: Ruby stores the strings without converting its encoding.