Converting UTF-8 Data to Outlook Compatible Charset
A problem in a current Rails app just found a decent solution, as Danish letters like æøå did not show up decently. It turned out (surprise) that Outlook had a problem accepting UTF-8 charset.
On the Meeting model in the Rails app I want to save to calendar in an Outlook compatible format. We solved it like this by converting from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 when creating the icalendar event.
meeting.rb:
require ‘date’
class Meeting < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :room
belongs_to :journal
def to_event
event = Icalendar::Event.new
event.summary = "Møde " + (journal.number || "no number..")
event.description = description.split("\n").join("\n\n")
event.klass = "PUBLIC"
event.start = start.to_datetime
event.end = self.end.to_datetime
event.location = meeting.room.name + " " meeting.room.address
event
end
And meetings_controller.rb:
require ‘iconv’
class MeetingsController < ApplicationController
include Icalendar
def show
@courtmeeting = Courtmeeting.find(params[:id])
respond_to do |format|
format.html # show.html.erb
format.xml { render :xml => @courtmeeting }
format.ical { render :text => render_to_ical([@courtmeeting]) }
end
end
def render_to_ical(courtmeetings)
headers[‘Content-Type’] = "text/calendar; charset=ISO-8859-1"
cal = Calendar.new
courtmeetings.each do |meeting|
cal.add_event(meeting.to_event)
end
Iconv.iconv(‘ISO-8859-1′, ‘UTF-8′, cal.to_ical).to_s
end
end
Very simple, yet very effective way to have your meetings exposed to Outlook in a way that solves the character encoding problems.
Technorati Tags: ruby, ruby on rails, charset, encoding, utf-8, latin-1, iso-8859-1, iconv
April 14th, 2008 at 16:33 (UTC)
This article suggests that Outlook 2003 is incapable of accepting UTF-8 messages. This is not true. It might be a component between the originating mailserver and Outlook that mangles the contents, as I have experienced myself. To be on the safe side, use Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable (and encode the contents accordingly)
May 23rd, 2008 at 05:26 (UTC)
Hew what about outlook 2007 ? but character encoding problems ? Thanks for your info man ! Help Me
March 23rd, 2009 at 14:28 (UTC)
We have this problem on Outlook 2007, we send the body as UTF-8 with the correct encoding type in header, but Outlook views it as not UTF-8.
July 1st, 2009 at 16:50 (UTC)
Ahh, good to know.