Testing for extended characters in watir-webdriver

I need to check for text with extended character set characters in my watir-webdriver scripts. For example checking for a link has the follow text;

Weiß

I read the text from a CSV file, which when edited looks like the above text. But when running the test in FireFox I get the following failure.

Wrong values on attribute table after add all save.
<"Wei\247"> expected but was
<"Wei\303\237>.

I tried sav开发者_如何学Cing it in the CSV as Wei\303\237 but the expected value then had double backslash characters.

How can I encode this in the CSV so I can check the text value safely cross platform and browser?

I had this problem, and I got around it by writing it in the spreadsheet as something like {S} and gsubbing it when I read the file into Ruby. If you gsub the text when you check the link too then basically you have your own encoding method for special characters. This is a long way around, so I'd be very interested in other answers.

The double backslash is probably because when your code reads from the CSV it escapes the backslashes in the file to preserve the text. Therefore you can't put the unicode in your CSV file. I don't really know a way around this. I hear that Ruby unicode support isn't that great, but is being worked on as of 1.9.x.