So, I'm trying to do some screen scraping off of a certain site using nokogiri, but the site owners failed to specify the proper encoding of the page in a <meta> tag. The upshot of this is that I'm trying to deal with strings that think they're utf-8, but really aren't.
(If you care, here are the files I was using to test this:
)
After doing a lot of searching around (this SO question was particularly useful), I found that calling encode('iso-8859-1', 'utf-8') on that test string "works", in that I get a proper © symbol. The issue now is that there are other characters in some other strings I want that really do not work at being converted to latin encoding (Shōta, for instance, turns into Sh�\x8Dta).
Now, I'm probably going to bother the appropriate webmasters and try and get them to fix their damn encodings, but in the meantime, I'd like to be able to use the bytes that I've got. I'm fairly certain that there is a way, but I just can't for the life of me figure out what it is.
So, the issue is that ANN only specifies encoding via headers, and Nokogiri doesn't receive the headers from the open() function. So, Nokogiri guesses that the page is latin-encoded, and produces strings that we really can't reverse to get back the original characters from.
You can specify the encoding to Nokogiri as the 3rd parameter to Nokogiri::HTML(), which solves the issue I was initially trying to solve. So, I'll accept this answer, even though the more specific question I asked (how to get those non-latin characters out of a latin string) is unanswerable.