Ruby 1.9, Rails 2.3.9 and unicode characters in database and erb views, still a no go?

Question

I have a Rails application running on Rails 2.3.9. It runs fine with ruby 1.8.7. I'm testing it with ruby 1.9.2-head right now.

The application loads fine until I try to load a page that relies on a unicode string. Then I get the infamous encoding error:

ActionView::TemplateError (incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT) …

It looks like the problem is that I'm getting some strings from the database as ASCII-8BIT.

I know Rails 3 works with ruby 1.9 and unicode fine. I wonder if a solution has been backported to 2.3.

So, is there any way to get unicode 2.3.9 rails apps working under ruby 1.9?

Answer 1

If you are using mysql, use this instead of the mysql gem http://github.com/tmtm/ruby-mysql . Leave "mysql" as your database adapter in database.yml.

We are running ruby 1.9.2-rc1 with rails 2.3.8 and this solved the incompatible character encoding issue.

Answer 2

So I went ahead and wrote a plugin that fixes the two underlying issues that were causing encoding problems:

• ActiveRecord models
• Rails built-in helpers

See UnicodeOverride plugin on GitHub.