Delete non-UTF characters from a string in Ruby?

Question

How do I delete non-UTF8 characters from a ruby string? I have a string that has for example "xC2" in it. I want to remove that char from the string so that it becomes a valid UTF8.

This:

text.gsub!(/\xC2/, '') 

returns an error:

incompatible encoding regexp match (ASCII-8BIT regexp with UTF-8 string) 

I was looking at text.unpack('U*') and string.pack as well, but did not get anywhere.

Answer 1

You can use encode for that. text.encode('UTF-8', :invalid => :replace, :undef => :replace)

For more info look into Ruby-Docs

Answer 2

You could do it like this

# encoding: utf-8  class String   def validate_encoding     chars.select(&:valid_encoding?).join    end end  puts "testing\xC2 a non UTF-8 string".validate_encoding #=>testing a non UTF-8 string