Long story short, I added
config.entities = false
to my config.js file to store utf-8 characters in my db instead of ascii. However, it doesn't work. Maybe the problem is my ckeditor/plugins/entities/plugin.js is empty. I install ckeditor using the gem at https://github.com/stream7/ckeditor for my rails app.
I tried to download the zip file at http://ckeditor.com/download but it doesn't have the entities plugin.
This app is used for Vietnamese. The problem arises when I want to search on Vietnamese text but ckeditor stores the user input content as ascii.
Here is an example:
á à ả ã ạ â ă é è ẻ ẽ ẹ ê ó ò ỏ õ ọ ô ơ
is store as
<p>\r\n\t\xC3\xA1 \xC3\xA0 \xE1\xBA\xA3 \xC3\xA3 \xE1\xBA\xA1 \xC3\xA2 \xC4\x83 \xC3\xA9 \xC3\xA8 \xE1\xBA\xBB \xE1\xBA\xBD \xE1\xBA\xB9 \xC3\xAA \xC3\xB3 \xC3\xB2 \xE1\xBB\x8F \xC3\xB5 \xE1\xBB\x8D \xC3\xB4 \xC6\xA1</p>\r\n