# Strange "Application error"

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strange-application-error/80187>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 22, 2006, 2:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strange-application-error/80187 "2006-12-22T02:44:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@tom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tom)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 2:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strange-application-error/80187/1 "2006-12-22T02:44:21Z")

</div>

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](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.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@tom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tom)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2006, 8:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strange-application-error/80187/2 "2006-12-22T08:58:52Z")

</div>

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

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@tom](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tom)\
**Post date:** [February 18, 2007, 8:55am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/strange-application-error/80187/3 "2007-02-18T08:55:49Z")

</div>

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

> **[Dan Benjamin](https://danbenjamin.com)**
>
> Dan Benjamin's personal website.

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/](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