Invalid multibyte char (UTF-8) on Windows command prompt

Ruby
1

Hi, I’m not really a programmer by career. My experience limits to learning Pascal way back in school and extended experience doing VBA on Office so I want to step up and I want to learn the Ruby language. I just installed Ruby using Rubyinstaller.org on Windows 10. I selected the “set all external text as UTF-8” just in case during installation. and then installed both ruby and MYSYS2 devkit.

I set to test some simple code using “Start command Prompt with Ruby” but as soon as I tried to execute a rb file I got “invalid multibyte char (UTF-8)” regarding lines which have string literals like:

puts "Probar el número."

I already tried using the magic encoding comment at the beginning of the file:

# encoding: UTF-8

to no avail. Curiously, if I try:

puts "test string".encoding

I do get UTF-8.

Although I can restrict myself to ASCII chars for a while, inability to use accented vowels and other symbols and letters like ¿ and ñ is hampering. Where can I look for in order to fix this issue?

2

Ok I kind of got it solved for now.

I just downloaded the trial version of RubyMine and when I opened the document there it showed me the characters with the ? sign so I quickly edited them there and saved the file and it nows runs as expected.

I need to check into the Notepad format since apparently it must be saving the .rb file in a such a way that Unicode characters don’t get recognized as such.

Well, will be sticking to learning the basics for now. If anyone has useful tutorials or reference for a aspiring Ruby programmer, let me now!

3

If anyone has useful tutorials or reference for a aspiring Ruby programmer, let me now!

If you’re looking for a Rails book, Michael Martl’s book is one of the best. You can find it on Amazon or at his site railstutorial.org