Character encoding in RoR

Rails
#1

Hi, I’m a newcomer to Ruby and to Rails, and am having a problem with
character encoding.

Now, I know ruby doesn’t handle unicode…but, characters like é
(eacute)
and ç (ccedil) are part of the iso-8859-1 charset, so it shouldn’t be a
problem, right?

But, for some reason, the string functions still seem to hang on those
characters.

As an example, in a brand new rails app, with a single model “Post”
mapped
to a database with id, title, and body, I generate a scaffold, and
create a
new entry with an accented character in the title.

Then, in the show.rhtml view, I add the .reverse method as follows:

<% for column in Post.content_columns %>

<%= column.human_name %>: <%=h @post.send(column.name).reverse %>

<% end %>

The entire title is reversed, as expected, except the é (eacute)
character
is now ?? (two question marks).

My MySQL DB is set up with latin-1 as the default. I don’t get what’s
going
on here.

help, anyone?

#2

On 7-aug-2006, at 7:02, Louis S. wrote:

As an example, in a brand new rails app, with a single model “Post”

<% end %>

The entire title is reversed, as expected, except the é (eacute)
character is now ?? (two question marks).

My MySQL DB is set up with latin-1 as the default. I don’t get
what’s going on here.

Did you set encoding: latin1 in database.yml ? MySQL might be
supplying you UTF8 strings because by default it has it\s client
charset set to UTF8.

–
Julian ‘Julik’ Tarkhanov
please send all personal mail to
me at julik.nl

#3

I checked my.ini in the mysql folder, it has
default-character-set=latin1.

I also did as you recommended and set “encoding: latin1” in
database.yml. I
restarted both MySQL server and WEbrick. I still have the same problem.

Just in case, I added

to the layout/posts.rhtml file, but that doesn’t help either.

Anyone?

#4

Found a solution:

http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/2114

uses this code:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_filter :configure_charsets

def configure_charsets
if request.xhr?
@response.headers[“Content-Type”] ||= “text/javascript;
charset=iso-8859-1”
else
@response.headers[“Content-Type”] ||= “text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1”
end
end

end

to set the encoding. Does anyone know of a more “permanent” (i.e.
configuration-level) solution to set this option so that non-ascii
characters won’t be garbled by Ruby string functions?