I am encountering some malformed text, and can't seem to find a generalized way to remove the special characters.

This is the text as seen on the website: `Technological�\x00 Sciences`. `String#force_encoding('UTF-8')` results: `Technological\u0000 Sciences`, which still causes Nokogiri to terminate early. 

I could do a quick and dirty gsub `"Technological\u0000 Sciences".gsub(/\u0000/,'')`, but was wondering if there was a more generalized solution, or a configuration in Nokogiri or ruby that would also work?