I have a bunch of .txt's that Notepad++ says (in its drop-down "Encoding" menu) are "ANSI".

They have German characters in them, [äöüß], which display fine in Notepad++.

But they don't show up right in irb when I `File.read 'this is a German text example.txt'` them.

So does anyone know what argument I should give `Encoding.default_external=`?

(I'm assuming that'd be the solution, right?)

When `'utf-8'` or `'cp850'`, it reads the "ANSI" file with "äöüß" in it as "\xE4\xF6\xFC\xDF"...

(Please don't hesitate to mention apparently "obvious" things in your answers; I'm pretty much as newbish as you can be and still know just enough to ask this question.)