ruby 1.9: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8

Question

In Ruby 1.9.3 it is possible to use String.encode to "ignore" the invalid UTF-8 sequences. Here is a snippet that will work both in 1.8 (iconv) and 1.9 (String#encode) :

require 'iconv' unless String.method_defined?(:encode)
if String.method_defined?(:encode)
  file_contents.encode!('UTF-8', 'UTF-8', :invalid => :replace)
else
  ic = Iconv.new('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE')
  file_contents = ic.iconv(file_contents)
end

or if you have really troublesome input you can do a double conversion from UTF-8 to UTF-16 and back to UTF-8:

require 'iconv' unless String.method_defined?(:encode)
if String.method_defined?(:encode)
  file_contents.encode!('UTF-16', 'UTF-8', :invalid => :replace, :replace => '')
  file_contents.encode!('UTF-8', 'UTF-16')
else
  ic = Iconv.new('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE')
  file_contents = ic.iconv(file_contents)
end

The accepted answer nor the other answer work for me. I found this post which suggested

string.encode!('UTF-8', 'binary', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: '')

This fixed the problem for me.

My current solution is to run:

my_string.unpack("C*").pack("U*")

This will at least get rid of the exceptions which was my main problem

Try this:

def to_utf8(str)
  str = str.force_encoding('UTF-8')
  return str if str.valid_encoding?
  str.encode("UTF-8", 'binary', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: '')
end

I recommend you to use a HTML parser. Just find the fastest one.

Parsing HTML is not as easy as it may seem.

Browsers parse invalid UTF-8 sequences, in UTF-8 HTML documents, just putting the "�" symbol. So once the invalid UTF-8 sequence in the HTML gets parsed the resulting text is a valid string.

Even inside attribute values you have to decode HTML entities like amp

Here is a great question that sums up why you can not reliably parse HTML with a regular expression: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

attachment = file.read

begin
   # Try it as UTF-8 directly
   cleaned = attachment.dup.force_encoding('UTF-8')
   unless cleaned.valid_encoding?
     # Some of it might be old Windows code page
     cleaned = attachment.encode( 'UTF-8', 'Windows-1252' )
   end
   attachment = cleaned
 rescue EncodingError
   # Force it to UTF-8, throwing out invalid bits
   attachment = attachment.force_encoding("ISO-8859-1").encode("utf-8", replace: nil)
 end

This seems to work:

def sanitize_utf8(string)
  return nil if string.nil?
  return string if string.valid_encoding?
  string.chars.select { |c| c.valid_encoding? }.join
end