TemplateError while rendering german special characters

Question

Hi

I am using following versions of Ruby and Rails on arch linux

[hardik@sunshine: kandibank ]$ ruby --version
ruby 1.9.1p429 (2010-07-02 revision 28523) [x86_64-linux]
[hardik@sunshine: kandibank ]$ rails --version
Rails 2.3.8

I am using the sqllite database in development mode.

I can store a string having German special characters (umlauts) without a problem i.e. Müller.

But when Rails try to render a page which extracts the same string from the database it crashes with following error message. It is strange that it renders the string "Löchen" properly which doesn't come from database.

ActionView::TemplateError (incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and
ASCII-8BIT) on line #28 of app/views/candidates/index.html.erb:
25:     <td><%=h candidate.notes %></td>
26:     <td><%= link_to 'Ansehen', candidate %></td>
27:     <td><%= link_to 'Editieren', edit_candidate_path(candidate)
%></td>
28:     <td><%= link_to 'Löchen', candidate, :confirm => 'Are you
sure?', :method => :delete %></td>
29:   </tr>
30: <% end %>
31: </table>

    app/views/candidates/index.html.erb:28:in `block in
_run_erb_app47views47candidates47index46html46erb'
    app/views/candidates/index.html.erb:16:in `each'
    app/views/candidates/index.html.erb:16
    app/controllers/candidates_controller.rb:8:in `index'
    <internal:prelude>:8:in `synchronize'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpserver.rb:111:in `service'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpserver.rb:70:in `run'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/server.rb:183:in `block in start_thread'

Rendered rescues/_trace (44.0ms)
Rendered rescues/_request_and_response (0.2ms)
Rendering rescues/layout (internal_server_error)

Any idea ?

regards, Hardik

Answer 1

This is a problem with Ruby 1.9.x and ERB. There's a whole thread on the Rails Lighthouse issue tracking system about it. I would recommend dropping back to Ruby 1.8.7 if you are able to.