Issue #19383 has been updated by austin (Austin Ziegler). It’s been a long time since I’ve used Windows, but the Windows console is notoriously stuck in 1980s encodings and using codepage 65001 *should* fix this in general. Otherwise, you’re going to get Windows 1252 encoding as your default input/output encoding even if Ruby is otherwise using UTF-8. I believe that since Ruby 3.0, Ruby by default uses UTF-8 but the boundaries caused by your console codepage may be a confounding factor. ---------------------------------------- Bug #19383: Time.now.zone encoding for German display language in Windows is incorrect https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19383#change-101497 * Author: stringsn88keys (Thomas Powell) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal * ruby -v: 3.1.3 * Backport: 2.7: UNKNOWN, 3.0: UNKNOWN, 3.1: UNKNOWN, 3.2: UNKNOWN ---------------------------------------- OS: Verified on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2022 and Ruby 2.7.7 through 3.1.3 Display language: Verified on German, but may impact other languages in which Time.now.zone returns characters that aren't [A-Za-z]. Time zone: CET (UTC +01:00) Amsterdam, Berlin, ... Time.now.zone # => "Mitteleuro\xE3ische Zeit" Time.now.zone.encoding # => #<Encoding:IBM437> puts Time.now.zone # => "Mitteleurop∑ische Zeit" (should be "Mitteleuropäische Zeit") Time.now.zone.encode(Encoding::UTF_8) # => "Mitteleurop∑ische Zeit" Doing a force_encoding on all encodings in Encoding.list reveals that ISO-8859-(1..16) and Windows-125(0,2,4,7) work to coerce the ä out of the time zone string: Time.now.zone.force_encoding(Encoding::WINDOWS_1252) # => "Mitteleuro\xE3ische Zeit" ... but ... Time.now.zone.force_encoding(Encoding::WINDOWS_1252).encode(Encoding::UTF_8) #=> "Mitteleuropäische Zeit" Related issue: This improper encoding/rendering caused Ohai's JSON output to be unparseable. Workaround was forcing to Windows-1252. https://github.com/chef/ohai/pull/1781 -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/