Active Record serialized attr losing string encodings (probably YAML issue), workarounds?

Answer 1

I did come up with one solution :

monkey patching String can force YAML to use \ escaping rather then binary and therefore return strings in the default encoding (UTF-8 for me) rather then ASCII-8BIT

class String
  def is_binary_data?
    encoding == Encoding::ASCII_8BIT unless empty?
  end
end

originally this routine uses some heuristics around which would be shorter \ escaping of binary encoding of the string which is why only some of the international strings I had were having problems.