Error: Incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

Question

I got the error incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT, when the view found in the database some characters like: ñ, á, é, etc.

My enviroment is:

Rails: 3.2.5
Ruby: 1.9.4p194
Database: Oracle 10g (10.2.0.1.0)

I can save this characters in the database, using Toad.

I tried to write this, in the first line of my view:

<% # encoding: utf-8 %>

In enviroment.erb

Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8

But nothing fixed this.

Please, can someone give some adviced to fixed this.

Thanks.

What is the database and national character set? select * from v$nls_parameter where parameter like '%CHARACTERSET'? — Justin Cave
As suggested in stackoverflow.com/questions/1779740/… you should read about and understand character encodings. The suggested links are a good place to start. — Adam Hawkes
@AdamHawkes thanks for your comment, I'll read the link for understand this. — Francisco Jacob
@JustinCave this is the sql's result: NLS_CHARACTERSER = WE8ISO8859P1 and NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET = AL16UTF16 — Francisco Jacob

mvlwn mvlwn · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-24T14:39:02

I have the same issues, and I resolved it after hours of searching with a monkey patch.

    module ActiveSupport #:nodoc:
      class SafeBuffer < String

        def safe_concat(value)
          value = force_utf8_encoding(value)
          raise SafeConcatError unless html_safe?
          original_concat(value)
        end

        def concat(value)
          value = force_utf8_encoding(value)
          if !html_safe? || value.html_safe?
            super(value)
          else
            super(ERB::Util.h(value))
          end
        end

        alias << concat

        private

        def force_utf8_encoding(value)
          self.force_encoding('UTF-8').html_safe unless self.encoding.name == 'UTF-8'
          value = (value).force_encoding('UTF-8').html_safe unless value.nil? || value.encoding.name == 'UTF-8'
          value
        end
      end
    end

Error: Incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

2 Answers