UTF-8 error when generating Excel file using axlsx gem

Question

I am trying to use the axlsx gem to generate an Excel file. This is a Ruby Rails application where the user views a report in the browser and can click a link to export the data to Excel. However, I am getting the following error:

"ArgumentError (invalid byte sequence in UTF-8)."

This error is occurring on the following line of code:

p.to_stream.read.

I am using Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 2.3.16. I am not serializing or trying to write the file to disk; I just want Excel to open the file and then the user can save the file if needed.

Has anyone ever seen this error?

Answer 1

I've seen the same error in a spec. I've yet to look into it further, but I forced the encoding to be binary for now:

# …

data = package.to_stream.read

data.force_encoding("BINARY")

expect(data).to be_present

I don't consider this a good solution, but I'm leaving it here as a workaround. I might update this answer if I keep digging.

EDIT: I've since tried doing the force_encoding in the code itself, so a generator class does to_stream.read.force_encoding("BINARY"). That seems to work: my UTF-8 strings look fine in LibreOffice in the created document.