Wrong encoding for partial

Question

I am running compass watch my_project on Windows XP.

• index.scss:

  @charset "UTF-8";
  @import 'partial';
  // ...
  

• _partial.scss:

  p:before {
      content: '•';
  }
  

• config.rb:

  encoding = "utf-8"
  

• Generated index.css:

  @charset "UTF-8";
  /* line 1, ../sass/_partial.scss */
  p:before {
    content: 'ÔÇó';
  }
  // ...
  

How do I make Compass/Sass interpret the partial as UTF-8? Is there perhaps an environment variable that I can set to change default character encoding used by Ruby (compass is a Ruby app)?

Answer 1

On my Windows 7 machine, it worked to add the following line to my project's config.rb

Encoding.default_external = 'utf-8'

Also found a great GUI for compass / less / JS compression: http://koala-app.com/

Answer 2

Maybe it is not a direct answer, but even if you can't make Compass/Sass interpret UTF as you want, you may simply try to use unicode escape:

p:before {
    content: "\2022";
}

Where 2022 is hexadecimal code for your symbol. To get this code I executed this in irb:

irb> "•"[0].ord.to_s(16)
=> "2022"

Probably not a good solution if you have a lot of unicode chars, but at least a workaround. For example, FontAwesome uses it in its stylesheets.

Answer 3

Apart from escaping the character (predictable, but tedious) as suggested by @NIA, there are two other ways around this:

1. Add @charset "utf-8"; to the top of _partial.scss
2. Save _partial.scss as "UTF-8 with BOM".

Judging by what I've read so far, this seems to be a generic Ruby/WIN issue with incorrect encoding detection/fallback when building strings read from files on disk.