title: Convert non-ASCII chars from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8
body: <p>I'm pulling text from remote sites and trying to load it into a Ruby 1.9/Rails 3 app that uses utf-8 by default.</p>
  
  <p>Here is an example of some offending text:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Cancer Res; 71(3); 1-11. ©2011 AACR.\n
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That Copyright code expanded looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Cancer Res; 71(3); 1-11. \xC2\xA92011 AACR.\n
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Ruby tells me that string is encoded as ASCII-8BIT and feeding into my Rails app gets me this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can strip the copyright code out using this regex</p>
  
  <pre><code>str.gsub(/[\x00-\x7F]/n,'?')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>to produce this</p>
  
  <pre><code>Cancer Res; 71(3); 1-11. ??2011 AACR.\n
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But how can I get a copyright symbol (and various other symbols such as greek letters) <strong>converted</strong> into the same symbols in UTF-8? Surely it is possible...</p>
  
  <p>I see references to using force_encoding but this does not work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>str.force_encoding('utf-8').encode
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I realize there are many other people with similar issues but I've yet to see a solution that works.</p>