I tried to parse an xml file with ruby and had problems converting ASCII-8BIT (binary in fact) to UTF-8.

This was the error message:

/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Ruby.tmbundle/Support/RubyMate/catch_exception.rb:15:in `sub’: incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8 (Encoding::CompatibilityError)

from /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Ruby.tmbundle/Support/RubyMate/catch_exception.rb:15:in `block in ‘

/Users/x42/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rexml/parsers/treeparser.rb:95:in `rescue in parse’: # (REXML::ParseException)

/Users/x42/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rexml/source.rb:212:in `match’

/Users/x42/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rexml/source.rb:212:in `match’

/Users/x42/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rexml/parsers/baseparser.rb:369:in `pull’

/Users/x42/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rexml/parsers/treeparser.rb:22:in `parse’

/Users/x42/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rexml/document.rb:230:in `build’

/Users/x42/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rexml/document.rb:43:in `initialize’

/Volumes/1500RAIDOPEN/x42/Documents/Projekte/weather_nagios_plugin/google_weather_nagios.rb:17:in `new’

/Volumes/1500RAIDOPEN/x42/Documents/Projekte/weather_nagios_plugin/google_weather_nagios.rb:17:in `’

…

Exception parsing

Line: 1

Position: 1396

Last 80 unconsumed characters:

>

Here is my solution:

xml_data = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(‘http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=Dueren’)).body

p xml_data.encoding

xml_data = xml_data.encode(“utf-8”, “iso-8859-1”)

p xml_data.encoding

puts xml_data

doc = REXML::Document.new(xml_data)