invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII) with Rails and Ruby 1.9

Question

Have you tried adding a magic comment in the script where you use non-ASCII chars? It should go on top of the script.

#!/bin/env ruby
# encoding: utf-8

It worked for me like a charm.

If you want to add magic comments on all the source files of a project easily, you can use the magic_encoding gem

sudo gem install magic_encoding

then just call magic_encoding in the terminal from the root of your app.

I just want to add my solution:

I use german umlauts like ö, ü, ä and got the same error.
@Jarek Zmudzinski just told you how it works, but here is mine:

Add this code to the top of your Controller: # encoding: UTF-8
(for example to use flash message with umlauts)

example of my Controller:

# encoding: UTF-8
class UserController < ApplicationController

Now you can use ö, ä ,ü, ß, "", etc.

That worked for me:

$ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8