Active record fields being truncated when containing special characters

Question

I am seeing strange behavior when saving strings to fields in my database when it contains special characters. In this example "á" or "\xE1"

So if the field is "TESTá" the field that gets persisted on save is "TEST".

Even more worryingly, if the field is validated as mandatory. And I set it to "á", validation passes but on save an empty string gets saved. Making the persisted record invalid!

My database encoding is UTF-8, so I think this is an encoding issue.

Indeed, if on the console I try a simple test I get this error:

» "TEST\xE1F".encode('UTF-8')
Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: "\xE1" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

So, how should I correctly persist special characters in rails / active record?

Thanks for any help.

Prasad Surase · Answer 1 · 2012-09-07T10:37:28.000

0

add the encoding type to ur migration

# encoding: utf-8
class SetDefaultValues < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def up
    change_column_default(:dimensions, :unit_of_measure, "inch")
    change_column_default(:gdnts, :unit_for_tolerance, "µinch")
  end
end

also in the model.

# encoding: utf-8
class Specifications::Specification < ActiveRecord::Base
  ...
end

edited Sep 07 '12 at 10:37

answered Sep 07 '12 at 10:30

Prasad Surase

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How do you set the encoding in the model? – Chris Sep 07 '12 at 10:35
I still get the same error. Does "\xe1".encode('UTF-8') produce an error for you in your rails console? – Chris Sep 07 '12 at 11:22
add it in ur controller and any other file where that special character is used. it doesnt give me any error on console. checkout http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7699018/in-ruby-on-rails-are-encoding-utf-8-and-config-encoding-utf-8-differe – Prasad Surase Sep 07 '12 at 11:59
The special character is not encoded in the file. It is being posted as a an http character. My config is all set to use UTF-8. The root of the problem is really that I am getting this error on my console, without touching any schema/models/controllers – Chris Sep 07 '12 at 13:05

Active record fields being truncated when containing special characters

1 Answers1