Strange "Application error"

Rails
1

This error is driving me crazy. I would really appreciate if someone
could shed some light on it.

I have a simple app with a couple models and a controller and a view.
It starts out working fine, then I start getting these vague errors
whenever I try to load anything except for the “Ruby on Rails: Welcome
Aboard” page (it won’t even display “action not found” etc, brand new
fresh controllers don’t work either)

Displayed in browser:

Application error, Change this error message for exceptions thrown
outside of an action (like in Dispatcher setups or broken Ruby code) in
public/500.html

From the log:

ActionView::TemplateError (uninitialized StringScanner object) on line
#0 of app/views/admin/add_log.rhtml

Here’s the full error: http://yachttom.com/misc/rails_error.txt

The really strange thing is if I make a fresh rails project and copy
the exact same code into the new project, it works fine for awhile then
does the exact same thing again.

Any idea what’s going on? I might just be doing something stupid but I
can’t figure out what…

Thank you.

2

This is more of a guess than anything else but I think you might a have
a problem with your ruby setup. The error your getting “uninitialized
StringScanner object” does not appear anywhere in rails and I’ve never
seen a rhtml file fail on line #0.

On my machine that error message is in a binary file called
strscan.bundle in this location:
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-darwin8.7.1/strscan.bundle

I would try reinstalling ruby possibly even compiling it yourself. You
might also try posting this to the ruby list.

Aaron

3

I’m back, with a newly formatted drive and fresh Ruby and Rails
installation as described here

And the exact same problem.

This is driving me absolutely nuts because each time the error occurs it
totally breaks my app and I have to start with a fresh rails project,
copy the code over, and try again until the same friggin thing happens
again. Maddening!

I’m thinking it has to be something specific to my application, so here
are all the relevant files, I’m at your mercy:

http://yachttom.com/misc/rails/

Most of the code is in the admin_controller.rb and admin/add_log.rhtml
files.

Basically this is supposed to take a url to a pdf of a day’s worth of
crime summaries, download and convert the pdf to text using rpdf2txt,
then parse each line of the resulting text into an Incident object and
save it to the database, and save the url and date in a separate
database as a DailyLog object.

It has worked fine in the past. I tried resurrecting it again after a
few months, and it mostly worked except when the form is sent the data
doesn’t get seem to get passed here: @log = DailyLog.new(params[:log])
thus it isn’t able to find the URL that was entered.

The bigger problem was that the weird error mentioned in my first post
came back and won’t go away.

Please please please take a moment to look over the code and see if
there’s any stupid errors or something else I’m missing. This is my
first rails project and other than this ridiculously agravating error I
really like it.

Thank you,

Tom

Aaron wrote:

This is more of a guess than anything else but I think you might a have
a problem with your ruby setup. The error your getting “uninitialized
StringScanner object” does not appear anywhere in rails and I’ve never
seen a rhtml file fail on line #0.

On my machine that error message is in a binary file called
strscan.bundle in this location:
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-darwin8.7.1/strscan.bundle

I would try reinstalling ruby possibly even compiling it yourself. You
might also try posting this to the ruby list.

Aaron