Encoding Undefined Conversion Error - Ruby on Rails , Error on Write
ruby, ruby-on-rails
Solution
You probably also could have done it by passing
:output_encoding => "binary"
to `File.open`, which I think would do the same thing as mode 'wb', perhaps more clearly. But nice job figuring out 'wb' :) .
Yeah, in ruby 1.9, which is char encoding aware, you often need to tell different things about the encoding you want, including the "null encoding" 'binary'.
It's possible Rails is setting the `Encoding.default_external` to UTF-8, and `File` is using `Encoding.default_external`, that could possibly be why rails vs not-rails makes a difference.
Encoding issues in ruby 1.9 can definitely get very confusing very fast, with lots of normally hidden state that can affect exactly what happens.
Problem
So I am trying to download a zip file from a website and put that data into a table. The download has been working before, but suddenly, it's not anymore. I get a "`write': "\xB6" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 (Encoding::UndefinedConversionError)" problem. Very strange, nothing has changed since i last ran the script. Here is the part of the code that is having the problems. I am using a gem which allows me to parse the DBF file within the zip file. Here's the code: ``` `write': "\xB6" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 (Encoding::UndefinedConversionError) ``` Thanks for the help UPDATE: I'm running within rails, obviously. I ran the script outside the rails environment, and it worked fine. So Rails is interfering somehow with the write process. UPDATE 2: SOLVED - I changed "w" to "wb" apparently this is caused by rails 3+. Didn't occur to me to try this before. Hopefully this helps other people.