Rails: How to send a http get request with UTF-8 encoding

Rails: How to send a http get request with UTF-8 encoding

I'm trying to use an external API to get some information
address=self.address
response =
HTTParty.get("http://api.map.baidu.com/geocoder/v2/?address=#{address}&output=json&ak=5dfe24c4762c0370324d273bc231f45a")
decode_response = ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(response)
However, the address is in chinese, so I need to convert into UTF-8 code,
if not I'll get URI::InvalidURIError (bad URI(is not URI?): How to do it?
I tried address=self.address.force_encoding('utf-8'), but it does not
work, maybe I should use other method instead?