I think it's 'cp1252', alias 'windows-1252'.
After reading Jörg's answer, I went back through the Encoding page on ruby-doc.org trying to find references to the specific encodings he mentioned, and that's when I spotted the Encodings.aliases method.
So I kludged up the method at the end of this answer.
Then I looked at the output in notepad++, viewing it as both 'ANSI' and utf-8, and compared that to the output in irb...
I could only find two places in the irb output where the utf-8 file was garbled in the exact same way it appeared in notepad++ when viewing it as 'ANSI', and those places were for cp1252 and cp1254.
cp1252 is apparently my 'filesystem' encoding, so I'm going with that.
I wrote a script to make copies of all the files converted to utf-8's, trying both from 1252 and 1254.
utf-8 regexes seem to work with both sets of files so far.
Now I have to try to remember what I was actually trying to accomplish before I ran into all these encoding headaches. xD
def compare_encodings file1, file2
file1_probs = []
file2_probs = []
txt = File.open('encoding_test_output.txt','w')
Encoding.aliases.sort.each do |k,v|
Encoding.default_external=k
ename = [k.downcase, v.downcase].join " --- "
s = ""
begin
s << "#{File.read(file1)}"
rescue
s << "nope nope nope"
file1_probs << ename
end
s << "\t| #{ename} |\t"
begin
s << "#{File.read(file2)}"
rescue
s << "nope nope nope"
file2_probs << ename
end
Encoding.default_external= 'utf-8'
txt.puts s.center(58)
puts s.center(58)
end
puts
puts "file1, \"#{file1}\" exceptions from trying to convert to:\n\n"
puts file1_probs
puts
puts "file2, \"#{file2}\" exceptions from trying to convert to:\n\n"
puts file2_probs
txt.close
end
compare_encodings "utf-8.txt", "np++'ANSI'.txt"
