rake tasks fail with invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII
asset-pipeline, bundler, rake, ruby, ruby-on-rails
Solution
Add
#encoding: utf-8
to the first line of your Rakefile (or whatever file has the strange characters in)
Problem
After upgrading to ruby 1.9.3 one of my apps is working fine but the second one I am trying to convert fails at the "assets:precompile" stage when I try to deploy with capistrano. Here is the stacktrace: ``` rake aborted! rake aborted! invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/trace_output.rb:16:in `block in trace_on' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/trace_output.rb:14:in `map' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/trace_output.rb:14:in `trace_on' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/application.rb:328:in `trace' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/application.rb:183:in `display_error_message' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/application.rb:169:in `rescue in standard_exception_handling' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/application.rb:159:in `standard_exception_handling' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/application.rb:88:in `load_rakefile' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/application.rb:72:in `block in run' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/application.rb:160:in `standard_exception_handling' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@global/gems/rake-10.0.4/lib/rake/application.rb:70:in `run' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@rails3211/bin/ruby_noexec_wrapper:14:in `eval' /Users/george/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392@rails3211/bin/ruby_noexec_wrapper:14:in `<main>' ``` I have read numerous posts and tried several suggestions but to no avail. I tried adding the following to the top of my gemfile: ``` if RUBY_VERSION =~ /1.9/ Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8 Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8 end ``` But it made no difference. I checked LANG and LC_ALL environment variables as follows ``` $ echo $LC_ALL en_NZ.UTF-8 $ echo $LANG en_NZ.UTF-8 ``` I'm afraid I dont really understand the message at all and I dont know how to identify the file that has the problem. I cant get any rake task to run - it gives the same error. Note that I can run the application perfectly fine in development mode.