Ruby 1.9.3 UndefinedConversionError

Question

Up until recently everything was working fine on my machines but since a few days I keep getting an error Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: U+2713 from UTF-8 to US-ASCII any time I post something from the browser to the server.

First since posts were involved I tried the most obvious thing with adding encoding to the database.yml:

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  hostname: localhost
  port: 5432
  username: mikael
  password:
  database: dev
  encoding: utf8

If I install ruby-debug19 and ruby-debug-base19 and run rails with:

rails s --environment=development --debug

Now everything is working fine. How the hell am I supposed to find out the cause of the problem so that I may fix it?

EDIT 1:

1.9.3p0 :001 > Encoding.default_internal
 => #<Encoding:UTF-8> 
1.9.3p0 :002 > Encoding.default_external
 => #<Encoding:UTF-8> 

EDIT 2: If I run in production mode everything works fine.

Answer 1

Try setting LC_ALL and LANG variable in your shell. Add these lines to your ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.zprofile or somewhere similar - depending on your system.

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

You can get a list of all locales by running locale -a. At the end you should see something similar when you run locale in a new terminal window:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

Answer 2

I had this problem today. My LC_ALL was blank but everything else looked correct according to Lenart's answer. Changing LC_ALL did not fix it for me either.

The solution for my project was to update rspec from 2.14.6 to 2.14.7.