GBP/pound sign being converted to question mark

Hi everbody. I’m at my wit’s end with a tiny bug in my Rails app. The UK
pound symbol (£) is being converted to a question mark (?) somewhere
when I save my models. Here’s all the information I can think of.

  • Constructing a model containing a £-sign and displaying its contents
    works fine.
  • Saving a £-sign into the database on the mysql command line and
    retrieving it is fine.
  • Constructing a model containing a £-sign and saving it to the database
    results in the ‘?’ being saved to the database instead of the £-sign.
  • Everything is working fine on my development system, but the problem
    occurs on the production server.
  • Both servers are using MySQL.
  • The £ symbol appears in all variants of ISO8859 but not in ASCII.
  • The application in question is running at http://owl.me.uk/ and and
    example of such a model that should contain a £-sign is
    richd.me | The sideways viewpoints of Rich Daley .
  • I have tried setting the charsets of the table in question to both
    latin1 and utf-8 to no avail.

Has anyone come across anything like this before? Does Rails try to
guess the encoding of the DB and rewrite the contents of models before
saving them? Can anyone suggest anywhere else I should be looking?

Take a look at
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings

I had a similar problem which was caused by data that unfortunately was
not in UTF-8 and was scraped from various sources including old windows
spreadsheets etc. I had to clean it up and also set the char set in the
content type header from an after filter within the controller.

Cheers

Jonathan