Enter Non-English Character in Text Field

I use Watir a lot. I wanted to set a text field to željko. I did not know it would hard. I tried this code.

browser.text_field(:index, 1).set("željko")

But, text field was set to §eljko, Ĺľeljko, just eljko or some other string (depending if I try from irb, or from file that is saved in some encoding).

I searched wtr-general and found different solutions.

I added

require "win32ole"
WIN32OLE.codepage = WIN32OLE::CP_UTF8

and

$KCODE = 'utf8'
require 'jcode'

to the top of the file.

I tried TextField#value= instead of TextField#set.

browser.text_field(:index, 1).value=("željko")

I saved file as UTF-8.

Nothing worked. I sent my question to wtr-general and Paul Carvalho answered.

[...] I have a Watir script [...] It reads the inputs from an Excel file into an Array and then I use the array data to populate the text fields. [...] I didn't use any special 'require' lines or KCodes. I just let Excel worry about holding the data [...]

I tried it, and it worked! It was simple, too. Just a few lines of code.

require 'watir'
excel = WIN32OLE::new('excel.Application')
workbook = excel.Workbooks.Open('C:\data.xls') # open file
worksheet = workbook.Worksheets(1) # the first worksheet
cell = worksheet.Range('a1')['Value'] # value of single cell
browser = Watir::IE.start('http://www.google.com/') # start IE
browser.text_field(:index, 1).set(cell) # set text field to value from cell