Problem with cyrillic characters in Ruby on Rails

In my rails app I work a lot with cyrillic characters. Thats no problem, I store them in the db, I can display it in html.

But I have a problem exporting them in a plain txt file. A string like "элиас" gets "—ç–ª–∏–∞—Å" if I let rails put in in a txt file and download it. Whats wrong here? What has to be done?

R开发者_运维百科egards,

Elias

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Obviously, there's a problem with your encoding. Make sure you text is in Unicode before writing it to the text file. You may use something like this:

ic = Iconv.new('UTF-8//IGNORE', 'UTF-8')
your_unicode_text = ic.iconv(your_text + ' ')[0..-2]

Also, double check that your database encoding is UTF-8. Cyrillic characters can display fine in DB and in html with non-unicode encoding, e.g. KOI8-RU, but you're guaranteed to have problems with them elsewhere.