Iconv translit working in every situation… but the running app!

Rails
1

Hi all,

I scourged the web, including this ML’s archives, and did not find an
answer for this.

I have the following code in my Rails app:

require ‘iconv’
…
@@converter = Iconv.new(‘ASCII//TRANSLIT’, ‘UTF-8’)
…
result = @@converter.iconv(text.to_s).downcase
…

Now, the facts:

  • Inbound text is indeed valid UTF-8
  • Transliteration works fine in the following situations:
    • Same box, irb, my user or the Rails app’s user
    • Same box, ruby interpreter, my user or the Rails app’s user
    • Same box, ruby script/console production!!!

And yet, despite running fine in the production-mode Rails console, it
b0rks within the running Rails app.

I tried dumping the environments in the Rails app and the production
console, and they’re just identical. No difference in traditional iconv
factors such as LANG or LC_xxx variables, for instance.

Perhaps a note of importance: this DOES work on my dev box:

OSX 10.4, libiconv 1.9.1-11 through Fink, ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.6

However, this b0rks on my stage server:

Debian Etch, iconv (libc) 2.3.6, libiconv-ruby 1.8.2, ruby 1.8.5,
Rails 1.2.6

…and on my production server:

RHEL5, iconv (libc) 2.5, ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.6 (frozen in vendor)

I’m at a loss here! Any idea?

Thanks!

–
Christophe P. aka TDD
[email protected]

2

I am having a very similar issue, but Rails just hangs and I have to
kill -9 mongrel. My line is doing this:

Iconv.conv(“utf-8”, “ISO-8859-1”, input_line)