Ruby on rails escape unicode characters in search

Question

There is a text saved in database, in the encoded format: for example for German letter

Ü

it stores

Ü

I don't know which method was used to make such a conversion. When executing search, I need to transform character Ü to Ü value, how this can be easily done in ROR? The following doesn't work:

'Ü'.html_safe -> Ü
ERB::Util.html_escape('Ü') -> Ü

Answer 1

Use htmlentities gem.

To convert from HTML entity to UTF-8 char:

require 'htmlentities'
HTMLEntities.new.decode('Ü')  # => "Ü"

From UTF-8 to HTML entity:

require 'htmlentities'
HTMLEntities.new.encode("Ü", :named)  # => "Ü"