Rails debug method only outputs !binary values

Question

I have scoured the internet as best I can for this problem, but I am completely shafted by the keyword !binary as search engines (including stackoverflow's internal search!) strip the exclamation mark.

I am working through the Rails tuorial at http://ruby.railstutorial.org - whcih has for the most part been an excellent resource. One of the useful things that I have at the bottom of my application.html.erb page is:

<%= dump(params) %>

I am told that a particular scenario should output the following:

--- !map:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
commit: Sign in
session: !ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess 
  password: ""
  email: ""
authenticity_token: BlO65PA1oS5vqrv591dt9B22HGSWW0HbBtoHKbBKYDQ=
action: create
controller: sessions

Instead I get the following:

--- !ruby/hash:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
!binary "dXRmOA==": ✓
!binary "YXV0aGVudGljaXR5X3Rva2Vu": ItPS/PZ+avYOGD2ckict1urJpatw1HinrVyk385/Yt8=
!binary "c2Vzc2lvbg==": !ruby/hash:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
  !binary "dXNlcm5hbWU=": ''
  !binary "cGFzc3dvcmQ=": ''
!binary "Y29tbWl0": Sign in
action: create
controller: sessions

Which is far less helpful.

I am assuming that rails has the option of outputting data as it is in memory (i.e. binary form) or it can decode the data and display it in plain text.

I am obviously getting the correct data, just in the wrong form.

The question is how do I get the plain text version?

The second question is why the heck does a site like stackoverflow not have a mechanism to include special characters in searches? Fundamental Fail IMO

Answer 1

Can you try changing from .dump to .inspect like this?

<%= params.inspect %>

Answer 2

I believe that's the string encoding for the key which is oddly represented as !binary even though there are no non 7-bit ASCII characters in there. The values are encoded as base-64 to render them in plain-text:

"dXRmOA==".unpack('m')
# => ["utf8"] 

This could be an artifact of your environment where the default string encoding is irregular.