title: how to convert character encoding with ruby 1.9
body: <p>i am currently having trouble with results from the amazon api.</p>
  
  <p>the service returns a string with unicode characters: <em>Learn Objective\xE2\x80\x93C on the Mac (Learn Series)</em></p>
  
  <p>with ruby 1.9.1 the string could not even been processed:</p>
  
  <pre><code>REXML::ParseException: #&lt;Encoding::CompatibilityError: incompatible encoding regexp match (UTF-8 regexp with ASCII-8BIT string)&gt;
  
  ...
  
  Exception parsing
  
  Line: 1
  
  Position: 1636
  
  Last 80 unconsumed characters:
  
  Learn Objective–C on the Mac (Learn Series)
  </code></pre>