From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2009-09-02T21:15:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby1.9: Encoding problems (how to use #force_encoding ?)

I単aki Baz Castillo wrote:
> Hi, I'm using geo_location Ruby gem which returns to me a hash with the 
> given
> IP geolocation.

Lots of gems are not ruby-1.9 compatible. You should probably report 
problems to the author, ideally with a patch which fixes it, and a test 
case which reproduces it.

> I use Ruby1.9 and UTF-8 works fine, but in this case, when the "city" 
> has
> "strange" symbols the the gem gives the string encoded in ASCII-8BIT.

All data read from a socket is tagged as ASCII-8BIT by default. That's 
probably what's happening in the library you're using.

> I need to send this string to a server which mandates UTF-8 usage so 
> sending
> it as it's fails.

That doesn't make much sense. A string, when it hits a socket, is just a 
stream of bytes. So you should be sending the same stream of bytes as 
you receive.

> I've tryed to convert the encoding but received an error:
> 
>   result.encode "UTF-8"
>    => `encode': "\xF3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8
>       (Encoding::UndefinedConversionError)

That's correct. Transcoding tries to *transcode* (replace characters one 
at a time), and these high characters in ASCII-8BIT have no Unicode 
equivalents.

> I've also tryed with force_encoding:
>   result.force_encoding "UTF-8"
> 
> and then, the "result" string is converted to UTF-8 (I've checked
> result.encoding)

It's not converted, it's just tagged as being a string of UTF-8 
characters, which it sounds like it is.

> but it's also not valid for the server

Again, doesn't mean much without seeing the code which is trying to 
submit this to the server.

> I need all of this just for a simple demo, so it owuld be valid for me 
> just to
> delete the non valid UTF-8 chars from the result string, but I don't 
> know
> how to do it.

   str.force_encoding("ASCII-8BIT")   # if not already
   str.gsub!(/[^\x20-\x7e]/,'')
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