Ruby on Rails 3, incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT with i18n

34
votes

I've got some troubles with the couple Rails 3.0.1, Ruby 1.9.2 and my website localization.

The problem is quite simple, i've got something like that in a view :

f.input :zip_code, :label => I18n.t('labels.zip_code')

and a es.yml file :

es:
  labels:
    zip_code: "Este código postal no es valido."

There are no troubles with the en.yml file (it's pure ASCII) but when the website is set with i18n.locale == 'es' I get this error :

incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

I have been looking around for quite a while but didn't found a way to use my UTF-8 translation files.

Did some knows how to make it works ?

Thanks for your help.

5
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3utf-8internationalizationcharacter-encoding
This is sort of off topic, but Ryan Bates just posted a railscast (railscasts.com/episodes/256-i18n-backends) on i18n today. If anyone sees this comment the week of 3/6/2011, then in a way this comment is sort of relevant to you. – aarona
James has a pretty nice tutorial on his blog, coverings almost all aspects of string encoding in Ruby 1.9. To understand what "external" and "internal" encoding mean, read it at: blog.grayproductions.net/articles/… – Nicolas
Here's an awesome explanation of encoding on Rails: yehudakatz.com/2010/05/05/… – B Seven

5 Answers

47
votes

Ok so problem solved after some hours of googling...

There was actually two bugs in my code. The first one was a file encoding error and the second was the problem with the MySQL Data base configuration.

First, to solve the error caused by MySQL I used this two articles :

http://www.dotkam.com/2008/09/14/configure-rails-and-mysql-to-support-utf-8/

http://www.rorra.com.ar/2010/07/30/rails-3-mysql-and-utf-8/

Second, to solve the file encoding problem I added these 2 lines in my config/environment.rb

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

Hopefully this will help someone :)

23
votes

I solved most of the problems by combining many solutions:

  • Make sure application.rb has this line: config.encoding = "utf-8".
  • Make sure you are using 'mysql2' gem
  • Putting # encoding: utf-8 at the top of any file containing utf-8 characters.

  • Add the following two lines above the <App Name>::Application.initialize! line in environment.rb:

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

http://rorguide.blogspot.com/2011/06/incompatible-character-encodings-ascii.html

0
votes

Are you sure your es.yml file was saved as UTF-8?

If you're on Windows, use http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ to make sure.

0
votes

Using this unpack function helped me sort this out finally, try this if you get the can't convert error message:

myString.unpack('U*').pack('U*')
0
votes

Make sure you have config.encoding = "utf-8" in your config/application.rb. Also, your example translation file doesn't match the key you're searching for (com_name and first_name) but I suppose that could just be a typo.