non ascii encoding

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi guys!

I have a company model with a name attribute. Each company is association a set of projects. I created a feature which allows users to

download a csv version of these projects. The download will give you a

zipped file of all projects grouped by company. So the zip file contains x

number of csv files where x is the number of companies. Everything is

working nice.

But when a user created a company whose name contains greek

characters, I suddenly get issues with encoding. Here’s a small part of

the code that creates the zip file (i’m using zipruby btw)

Zip::Archive.open(file, Zip::CREATE) do |archive|

companies.each do |company|

data = CSV.generate(row_sep: “\r\n”, quote_char: ‘"’, force_quotes: true) do |csv|

company.projects.each { |project| csv << project.name }

end

archive.add_buffer “#{company.name}.csv”, data

end

end

so when company.name contains greek characters, i get a filename similar to company???.csv which cant be opened. I can’t find a

way to set the encoding of the filename so I just gsubbed it and ignored

all non-ascii characters which is fine. But if one of the projects also

has a greek character, then the csv file will contain weird non-greek

characters.

Any help or insight is appreciated. Thanks!

2

Hi Jim,

Looks that you have encoding problems, check your current encoding

puts Encoding.default_external

To solve your problem it should be UTF-8. Because according to the docs Class: Encoding (Ruby 1.9.3)

“File data written to disk will be transcoded to the default external encoding when written.”

Or you can use additional options :encoding in CSV.generate (Class: CSV (Ruby 1.9.2))

3

Hi Jim,

Hi Max, thanks for replying. I gave

Looks that you have encoding problems, check your current encoding

puts Encoding.default_external

To solve your problem it should be UTF-8. Because according to the docs Class: Encoding (Ruby 1.9.3)

*"File <http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/File.html&gt; data written to disk will be transcoded to the default external encoding when written."*

I checked that out, it is set to utf-8

Encoding.default_external

=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>

Or you can use additional options :encoding in CSV.generate ( Class: CSV (Ruby 1.9.2) )

i'll try this one out but it seems like if i pass the encoding here, all strings passed will be processed as having that encoding right? But anyway, it's the only lead I have so I'll give it a try. Thanks!