This is not a question but a report on the difficulties I had and the
solution I found with respect to UTF-8, YAML::load, and Ruby/Rails.
Comments are appreciated.
I had been struggling for two days to get UTF-8 working in my Rails app.
I had/have a localization file, lib\locale\de.yml, that had iso-8859-1
encoding. I could not get that to display properly.
Marnen, quite correctly, suggested that I transit to UTF-8. Of course,
I had tried to do that but I could not get the YAML localization file to
load.
What I had done was load the ANSI (i.e. iso-8859-1) localization file
into Notepad, convert to UTF-8, and saved that file.
Then all my German (de.yml) localizations failed.
It turns out that Notepad places “\xEF\xBB\xBF” at the beginning of the
file to indicate that this is a YAML file.
These three bytes appear to screw up YAML::load
Gimme a break!
Note only does Notepad put in these indicator bytes … so does
TextMate.
In fact, TextMate will happily determine that your non-“\xEF\xBB\xBF”
file is a UTF-8 file and will automatically reinsert the indicator
bytes. I find this rather hysterical (not in a good way) since in
Handling encodings (UTF-8) one of the
authors of TextMate wrote “Property 3 turns out to be attractive because
it means we can heuristically recognize UTF-8 with a near 100% certainty
by checking if the file is valid. Some software think it’s a good idea
to embed a BOM (byte order mark) in the beginning of an UTF-8 file, but
it is not, because the file can already be recognized, and placing a BOM
in the beginning of a file means placing three bytes in the beginning of
the file which a program that use the file may not expect…”.
How thoughtful that TextMate does what the article says it should not
do. If there is a way to turn off that behavior, I can’t find it.
Maybe there’s a TextMate bundle … who knows?
In order to get YAML::Load to load the localization, I have to remove
the three indicator bytes. Yuck!
Once I did that, YAML loads happily.
If you store your locales in lib/locale and you use the
AVAILABLE_LOCALES idiom as suggested in
http://rails-i18n.org/wiki/pages/i18n-available_locales then you can use
this in config\initializers\available_locales.rb
#See Rails Internationalization (I18n) API — Ruby on Rails Guides
# Get loaded locales conveniently
See http://rails-i18n.org/wiki/pages/i18n-available_locales
module I18n
class << self
def available_locales; backend.available_locales; end
end
module Backend
class Simple
def available_locales; translations.keys.collect { |l| l.to_s
}.sort; end end
end
end
You need to “force-initialize” loaded locales
I18n.backend.send(:init_translations)
AVAILABLE_LOCALES = I18n.backend.available_locales
RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER.debug “* Loaded locales:
#{AVAILABLE_LOCALES.inspect}”
#Shnelvar: Remove UTF-8 indicator bytes so that YAML::load works
AVAILABLE_LOCALES.each do |localization_name|
# localization_name is, e.g. “de”
localization_name_dot_yml = localization_name + ‘.yml’
localization_file_name =
File.join(‘lib/locale’,localization_name_dot_yml)
yaml_str = IO.read(localization_file_name)
utf_8__3_byte_indicator = "\xEF\xBB\xBF"
if yaml_str[0..2] == utf_8__3_byte_indicator
yaml_str = yaml_str[3...yaml_str.size]
File.open(localization_file_name,"w") { |f| f << yaml_str }
puts localization_file_name + ' has had the UTF-8 indicator bytes
removed’
end
end
Suggestions and comments are welcome.