How to use send an email with accents using actionmailer

Question

My enviroment.rb is like this:

ActionMailer::Base.default_charset = "iso-8859-1"

wich should be enough for accents, but here is how the message's subject is been sent:

Convite para participação de projeto

Does anyone know what I have to do to fix it?

Thanks

Answer 1

Is your data in iso-8859-1? From the look of the error example, it seems to be two bytes per character (note the repetition of Ã). Since 8859-1 uses 1 byte per character, my guess is that your data is in utf-8 format.

Also check that your db is not doing any conversions on data going in or out.

I urge you to use unicode / utf-8 everywhere--database, html, emails, etc. It's what all of the kool-kids are using these days. 8859-1 is so last century!

Regarding emails

  config.action_mailer.default_charset = "utf-8"

is what I use.

Answer 2

Just remove your setting and let Rails do the work using the default charset, UTF-8.

I work with emails and special characters all the time, there's no need to perform any kind of conversion or setting, at least not on Rails 3. As long as your strings contains the right characters, you'll be fine.

Just make sure the encoding error is not ocurring when reading the data from your database.