That's pretty much it. I'm using Nokogiri to scrape a web page what has ’ ; characters in it, and I can't figure out how to do the conversion. here's what I tried: str.gsub(/’/,"'") str.gsub("’","'") str.gsub("GÇÖ","'") # that's how it looks when I do a puts (In the above, there's no space between the ’ and the ";", but if I don't put the space in, SO converts it to an apostrophe -- the cruel, cruel irony!) I'm sure this is covered somewhere, but couldn't find the solution here or on the web. TIA