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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T16:35:42+00:00

I’m trying to parse email strings with the Ruby mail gem , and I’m

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I’m trying to parse email strings with the Ruby mail gem, and I’m having a devil of a time with character encodings. Take the following email:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Sender: foobar@example.com
Received: by 10.142.239.17 with HTTP; Thu, 14 Jun 2012 06:00:18 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:00:18 -0400
Delivered-To: foobar@gmail.com
X-Google-Sender-Auth: MxfFrMybNjBoBt4O4GwAn9cMsko
Message-ID: <CAGErOzF3FV5NvzN3zUpLGPok96SFzK18Z4HerzyYNALnzgMVaA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Lorem Ipsum] Foo updated the forum topic 'Reply by email test'
From: Foo Bar <foo@example.com>
To: Foo <c49964d167e08e7d4a1930e6565f23c258be19a0@foo.example.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

This email has accents:=A0R=E9sum=E9
>
> --------- Reply Above This Line ------------
>
> Email parsing with accents: R=E9sum=E9
>
> Click here to view this post in your browser

The email body, when properly encoded, should be:

This reply has accents: Résumé
>
> --------- Reply Above This Line ------------
>
> Email parsing with accents: Résumé
>
> Click here to view this post in your browser

However, I’m having a devil of a time actually getting the accent marks to come through. Here’s what I’ve tried:

message = Mail.new(email_string)
body = message.body.decoded

That gets me a string that starts like this:

This reply has accents:\xA0R\xE9sum\xE9\r\n>\r\n> --------- Reply Above This Line ------------

Finally, I try this:

body.encoding # => <Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>
body.encode("UTF-8") # => Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: "\xA0" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this? I’m pretty sure it has to do with the “charset=ISO-8859-1” setting in the email, but I’m not sure how to use that, or if there’s a way to easily extract that using the mail gem.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    After playing a bit, I found this:

    body.decoded.force_encoding("ISO-8859-1").encode("UTF-8") # => "This reply has accents: Résumé..."
message.parts.map { |part| part.decoded.force_encoding("ISO-8859-1").encode(part.charset) } # multi-part

    You can extract the charset from the message like so.

    message.charset #=> for simple, non-multipart
message.parts.map { |part| part.charset } #=> for multipart, each part can have its own charset

    Be careful with non-multipart, as the following can cause trouble:

    body.charset #=> returns "US-ASCII" which is WRONG!
body.force_encoding(body.charset).encode("UTF-8") #=> Conversion error...

body.force_encoding(message.charset).encode("UTF-8") #=> Correct conversion :)
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