I just encountered my first MultiByte problem with Rails <= 1.1 I guess I have been lucky. I am just wondering if ActiveSupport::MultiByte fix this specific case.
I'm inclined to say no. Multibyte doesn't magically solve any problems you might have with multibyte encoded strings. It solves problems with encoded strings in most Rails methods that handle string somehow, like view helpers.
render_text _("Rename selected %s to `%s' now.") % [params[:item_type], params['name']]
the two params['xx'] contains Japanese strings. and are displayed as
%u65D7%u9F13
Have you checked what the actual encoding of the strings is before you assign to the string? One good test to is too check if they're utf-8 by calling String#is_utf8?.
but since I never had this problem before, I doubt the problem is actually the % operator. while it may be. I think it is important to note this is happening through Ajax. which might be causing the problem as well.
Most data processing pipelines still aren't utf-8 by default. You have to make sure that everything is doing the utf-8 dance. So make sure the page where the request is coming from was served with ;charset=utf-8 in the content-type. You might even want to specify the content-type with a meta tag.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
If you're getting Ajax request from a page beyond your control, you might be out of luck because it's hard to find out what encoding your getting the string in. If you know what encoding they're sending you can fix the encoding with iconv.
Would this work under rails 1.2 with ActiveSupport::MultiByte and is it possible to install ActiveSupport::MultiByte on rails 1.1.6 ?
If it doesn't work in the rails-1.2 pre-release branch, it's probably not going to change for the release unless it's a major bug. It is very possible to install ActiveSupport::Multibyte in older versions of Rails. You only get the ActiveSupport::Multibyte namespace with all the operations, not all the code fixes currently in edge. You can find more information about this on: https://fngtps.com/projects/multibyte_for_rails/wiki/WikiStart
