invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII) with Ruby on Rails

Question

Hi,

I'm using Ruby 1.9.1 with Rails 2.3.4 My application is to handle text input

If I try something like (the inside quotation marks look different)

text = "”“"

I get the following error:

#<SyntaxError: /Users/tammam56/rubydev/favquote/lib/daemons/twitter_quotes_fetch.rb:54: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)
/Users/tammam56/rubydev/favquote/lib/daemons/twitter_quotes_fetch.rb:54: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)
/Users/tammam56/rubydev/favquote/lib/daemons/twitter_quotes_fetch.rb:54: syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting keyword_end

I need to user those quotation marks as users might input them and I have to account for that?

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Tam

Answer 1

Those slanted double quotes are not ASCII characters. The error message is misleading about them being 'multi-byte'.

Answer 2

Those particular quotation marks are not valid ASCII characters. Here is a reference for the different types of UTF quotation marks and their relationship to ASCII characters. If you need to accept those quotation marks you will need to accept UTF strings, which should be the default in Rails 2.3.x (IIRC). If you need to deal with handling UTF input in Rails I would refer to this article.

Answer 3

Have you tried adding magic comment in the script where you use non-ascii chars? It should go on top of the script.

# coding: utf-8

It worked for me like charm.

Answer 4

If you want to add magic comments on all the source files of a project easily, you can use the magic_encoding gem

sudo gem install magic_encoding

then just call "magic_encoding" from the root of your app.