ruby `encode': “\xC3” from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 (Encoding::UndefinedConversionError)

Question

Hannibal episodes in tvdb have weird characters in them.

For example:

Œuf

So ruby spits out:

./manifesto.rb:19:in `         


        

Answer 1

I just suffered through a number of hours trying to fix a similar problem. I'd checked my locales, database encoding, everything I could think of and was still getting ASCII-8BIT encoded data from the database.

Well, it turns out that if you store text in a binary field, it will automatically be returned as ASCII-8BIT encoded text, which makes sense, however this can (obviously) cause problems in your application.

It can be fixed by changing the column encoding back to :text in your migrations.