Force strings to UTF-8 from any encoding

Question

Ruby 1.9

“Forcing” an encoding is easy, however it won’t convert the characters just change the encoding:

str = str.force_encoding('UTF-8')

str.encoding.name # => 'UTF-8'

If you want to perform a conversion, use encode:

begin
  str.encode("UTF-8")
rescue Encoding::UndefinedConversionError
  # ...
end

I would definitely read the following post for more information:
http://graysoftinc.com/character-encodings/ruby-19s-string