on 2012-01-03 Google changed the XML for their address books, and that breaks jruby

At first I thought, it breaks XmlSimple or REXML, but everything is fine with MRI ruby, just jruby (up until 1.6.5.1) is concerned.

Before then Google Contacts had their German “umlauts” (ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü) and the German “sz” i.e. “ß” represented as “ä” (for ä) etc.

In the middle of that day they changed that, and started showing the characters themselves (in UTF-8).