I'm not sure the problems are related, but I've had to convert data from
an Oracle database with Win-1252 encoding to UTF-8 for generating
OpenOffice files. For that, I used the following syntax (being new to
Ruby/Rails, I still prefer plain SQL queries...):
@wrk_vpreparations = WrkVpreparation.find_by_sql(
["SELECT CONVERT( CODE, 'UTF8', 'WE8MSWIN1252' ) AS CODE,
CONVERT( DESC_FR, 'UTF8', 'WE8MSWIN1252' ) AS
DESCRIPTION
FROM WRK_VPREPARATIONS
WHERE ID=?", params[:id]] )