Converting UTF8 to ANSI with Ruby

Question

I have a Ruby script that generates a UTF8 CSV file remotely in a Linux machine and then transfers the file to a Windows machine thru SFTP.

I then need to open this file with Excel, but Excel doesn't get UTF8, so I always need to open the file in a text editor that has the capability to convert UTF8 to ANSI.

I would love to do this programmatically using Ruby and avoid the manual conversion step. What's the easiest way to do it?

PS: I tried using iconv but had no success.

Answer 1

ascii_str = yourUTF8text.unpack("U*").map{|c|c.chr}.join

assuming that your text really does fit in the ascii character set.

Answer 2

I finally managed to do it using iconv, I was just messing up the parameters. So, this is how you do it:

require 'iconv'

utf8_csv = File.open("utf8file.csv").read

# gotta be careful with the weird parameters order: TO, FROM !
ansi_csv = Iconv.iconv("LATIN1", "UTF-8", utf8_csv).join

File.open("ansifile.csv", "w") { |f| f.puts ansi_csv }

That's it!