Different Iconv behavior with the same Ruby version

Rails
#1

Hi all,

This problem is making me nuts. I am using Iconv.conv to convert from
UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1:

Iconv.conv(‘iso-8859-1//IGNORE’, ‘utf-8’, @data).html_safe

Both locally and on production the Ruby version is 1.9.3p0 (Rails
3.0.3), but it raises the following exception only on production:

A Iconv::IllegalSequence occurred in newsletters#show:

“e acompanham, na”…
app/controllers/newsletters_controller.rb:19:in `conv’

If I delete that part of the text, it raises again in other location.
This is really strange because the contents locally and on production
are exactly the same. Here is the text I am trying to convert (user
created data): https://gist.github.com/1664294. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Henrique

#2

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Henrique T.
[email protected]wrote:

A Iconv::IllegalSequence occurred in newsletters#show:

Henrique

FWIW, I was able to reproduce the exception

Iconv::IllegalSequence

with a simple ruby program (rvm ruby 1.9.3).

$ wget
https://raw.github.com/gist/1664294/17c4e28a1bf87b331c0425e9ddbb48284d096b00/gistfile1.txt
–2012-01-23 18:16:02–
https://raw.github.com/gist/1664294/17c4e28a1bf87b331c0425e9ddbb48284d096b00/gistfile1.txt
Resolving raw.github.com… 207.97.227.243
Connecting to raw.github.com|207.97.227.243|:443… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 50089 (49K) [text/plain]
Saving to: `gistfile1.txt’

100%[======================================>] 50,089 --.-K/s in
0.08s

2012-01-23 18:16:03 (584 KB/s) - `gistfile1.txt’ saved [50089/50089]

$ cat convert.rb
@data
File.open(‘gistfile1.txt’) do |f|
@data = f.read
end

require ‘iconv’
Iconv.conv(‘iso-8859-1//IGNORE’, ‘utf-8’, @data).html_safe

$ ruby convert.rb
/home/peterv/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p0/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in
require': iconv will be deprecated in the future, use String#encode instead. convert.rb:7:inconv’: " style=“padding-”… (Iconv::IllegalSequence)
from convert.rb:7:in `’

I will do a little bit of research more,

Peter

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.

–
Peter V.
http://twitter.com/peter_v
http://rails.vandenabeele.com
gsm: +32-478-27.40.69
e-mail: [email protected]

#3

Thank you very much Peter! I used your code and replaced these UTF-8
only chars for similars in ISO-8859-1 (tryed the transliterate mehod but
it seems it doesn’t work for special chars).

Thanks again,

Henrique

#4

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Peter V.
[email protected]wrote:

3.0.3), but it raises the following exception only on production:

100%[======================================>] 50,089 --.-K/s in
require ‘iconv’

Some relevant links:

http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/05/ruby-1-9-encodings-a-primer-and-the-solution-for-rails/
http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Encoding/Converter.html#method-i-convert

The code that seems to function fairly well is:

$ cat convert.rb
File.open(‘gistfile1.txt’) do |f|
f.readlines.each do |line|
puts “###############################################”
puts line.valid_encoding? # always true

ec = Encoding::Converter.new("utf-8", "ISO-8859-1", :undef =>

:replace)
ec.replacement = “UNDEFINED”
puts ec.convert(line)
end
end

$ ruby convert.rb > result

This code converts your entire document (line by line)
without throwing exceptions.

The source text seems to be always valid UTF-8.

But … some UTF-8 constructs seem to be incompatible to translate
to ISO-8859-1, e.g. the long dash in this piece of text:

“… institucional do Grupo Zaffari alis …”

It is found back in the output with the code “UNDEFINED” that I defined.

Without the :undef, that produced:

convert.rb:9:in `convert’: U+2013 from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1
(Encoding::UndefinedConversionError)

That seems quite plausible since UTF-8 has many different code points,
but ISO-8859-1 is limited to 1 byte if I understand correctly.

I hope this can put you on the right track,

Peter