This is cross-posted to railsforum.com, so if you frequent both you may see it in both places.
So, my co-worker and I are working on this project, a Rails app using an MS SQL database with lots of legacy stuff built in. He's stumbled across a strange error, and we don't really know where to start. Here's the gist of things:
This is an online place for buying things, and descriptions for each item are stored in the database as encoded strings. On a particular product, pulling a database object from the database with Product.find formats this string incorrectly, replacing encoded characters with '?', in all environments on both servers we run this project from, EXCEPT from the CONSOLE of the production environment (in which case, everything comes out exactly as it should). In development environments, both the console and the app return mis-encoded strings. In the actual production application (diagnosed with logs, and shown on the actual page), the encoding is messed up. SO, the question is:
What could be giving different behavior between the console and the app of the same environment? Why isn't this difference consistent among environments (i.e., why isn't the output sane in the development environment console)? If we could nail that difference, we could compensate for whatever is giving this wonky output. As it is, we're pretty stumped.
Thanks in advance for any response.