title: How to convert a string to UTF8 in Ruby
body: <p>I'm writing a crawler which uses Hpricot. It downloads a list of strings from some webpage, then I try to write it to the file. Something is wrong with the encoding:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"\xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have items which are rendered on a webpage and printed this way: </p>
  
  <pre><code>DÃ©veloppement
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>the <code>str.encoding</code> returns <code>UTF-8</code>, so <code>force_encoding('UTF-8')</code> doesn't help. How may I convert this to readable UTF-8?</p>