Cross post from SO, hoping to get more insight here.
I've got a column called message in one of my model (UserMessage) in rails. Now message can contain emoticon value which I passed in from an iphone app.
For example, the smiley icon has the unicode value of U+1F604 and since it's passed in with json format, it's serialize to "\u{1F604}" in my database (postgres).
Now all is fine until I call render :json => @user_message in my controller. Rails take the serialized message "\u{1F604}" and call ActiveSupport::JSON.encode on it and therefore encode it again. I've try to override to_json in the UserMessage class to no avail.
Can someone please point me to the right direction?