Ruby on Rails 3, incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT with i18n

Question

I've got some troubles with the couple Rails 3.0.1, Ruby 1.9.2 and my website localization.

The problem is quite simple, i've got something like that in a view :

f.input :zip_code, :label => I18n.t('labels.zip_code')

and a es.yml file :

es:
  labels:
    zip_code: "Este código postal no es valido."

There are no troubles with the en.yml file (it's pure ASCII) but when the website is set with i18n.locale == 'es' I get this error :

incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

I have been looking around for quite a while but didn't found a way to use my UTF-8 translation files.

Did some knows how to make it works ?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Ok so problem solved after some hours of googling...

There was actually two bugs in my code. The first one was a file encoding error and the second was the problem with the MySQL Data base configuration.

First, to solve the error caused by MySQL I used this two articles :

http://www.dotkam.com/2008/09/14/configure-rails-and-mysql-to-support-utf-8/

http://www.rorra.com.ar/2010/07/30/rails-3-mysql-and-utf-8/

Second, to solve the file encoding problem I added these 2 lines in my config/environment.rb

Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8

Hopefully this will help someone :)

Answer 2

I solved most of the problems by combining many solutions:

• Make sure application.rb has this line: config.encoding = "utf-8".
• Make sure you are using 'mysql2' gem
• Putting # encoding: utf-8 at the top of any file containing utf-8 characters.

• Add the following two lines above the <App Name>::Application.initialize! line in environment.rb:

  Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
  Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8
  

http://rorguide.blogspot.com/2011/06/incompatible-character-encodings-ascii.html