By default Rails allows users of our application to input non-utf8 data, such as: ¶®«¼

However when we attempt to retrieve the data from our database and render it in a template Rails incorrectly assumes that it is in UTF-8 format and throws an error.

ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8

What is the best way to handle this? I have seen one fix that suggested sanitizing the data in every place the user can input it. However, that would involve changing a considerable amount of code and it would strip out the characters entirely. Ideally we would want some characters converted to their UTF-8 equivalents.

Our environment:

Ruby: 1.9.1
Rails 2.3.5
MySql Gem: 2.8.1

This is a serious and urgent problem for us so your answers are very appreciated!