I have searched all over and cannot find anyone with the same problem.
I am testing upgrading a large Rails app running Rails 2.3.8 with Ruby 1.9.2 using rvm and nginx+passenger (currently running on 1.8.7 in production).
I'm using the mysql2 gem, and my database uses UTF-8 encoding. When I login to the app (standard restful-auth), the db lookup finds a match but when the controller tries to save an attribute change on the User model, it raises a validation error from validates_length_of.
I added some debugging output to ActiveRecord and it looks like it thinks all my database record's string values are empty (show up as "[]" in the logs...)
I was seeing the same behavior in script/console: User.first.login => "[]", but it was fixed after switching to the mysql2 gem (and updating database.yml adapter value).
Why would the console work but not via the website? ActionController / ActiveSupport bug??
Clarification: This is a stable app that has been live for 1+ years in 1.8.7 with hundreds of specs.