Non ascii characters in link_to is causing the app to fail in internet explorer 9 in rails app

Question

I have a recipe search form in my rails app. In a recipe's detail, I have a link to return to the results. The line I added is:

link_to "Return to search", :back

In Internet Explorer 9, because the :back link has a utf-8=✓ in the url, I get an encoding error. The description of the error is:

ActionView::Template::Error (incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8)

Let there be known the encoding in my application.rb is set to utf-8. I'm using ruby 1.9.2.

Answer 1

On Ruby 1.9.x you should specify the encoding on each .rb file. Add this on the first line of each:

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-