Why is this displaying weird characters on the console?

Question

Take this text for example:

the three umlauts are ä, ö, and ü..

Let's assume they are in a text file, which I'm reading like this:

data = File.read("umlauts.txt")

Now, if I try to output them, I get this:

the three umlauts are Σ, ÷, and ⁿ.

If I write it to a file, they get outputted correctly. How can I make them show up properly on a windows command prompt? I'm using Ruby 1.8.6. I want to be able to perform quick debug from the command prompt.

Answer 1

What encoding is the file? I'm guessing probably utf-8. Windows cmd prompt does not use utf-8.

Here's a good article that covers this: http://illegalargumentexception.blogspot.com/2009/04/i18n-unicode-at-windows-command-prompt.html

Answer 2

Maybe set a different code page for cmd?

For explanations on encodings, read this.