Couchdb bad_utf8_character_code - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

I am using couchdb through couchrest in a ruby on rails application. When I try to use futon it alerts with a message box saying bad_utf8_character_code. If I try to access records from rails console using Model.all it raises either of 500:internal server error,
RestClient::ServerBrokeConnection: Server broke connection: or Errno::ECONNREFUSED: Connection refused - connect(2)
Could any one help me to sort this issue?

Answer 1

I ran into this issue. I tried various curl calls to delete, modify, and even just view the offending document. None of them worked. Finally, I decided to pull the documents down to my local machine one at a time, skip the "bad" one, and then replicate from my local out to production.
Disable app (so no more records are being written to the db)
Delete and recreate local database (run these commands in a shell):
curl -X DELETE http://127.0.0.1:5984/mydb
curl -X PUT http://127.0.0.1:5984/mydb
Pull down documents from live to local using this ruby script
require 'bundler'
require 'json'
all_docs = JSON.parse(`curl http://server.com:5984/mydb/_all_docs`)
docs = all_docs['rows']
ids = docs.map{|doc| doc['id']}
bad_ids = ['196ee4a2649b966b13c97672e8863c49']
good_ids = ids - bad_ids
good_ids.each do |curr_id|
curr_doc = JSON.parse(`curl http://server.com:5984/mydb/#{curr_id}`)
curr_doc.delete('_id')
curr_doc.delete('_rev')
data = curr_doc.to_json.gsub("\\'", "\'").gsub('"','\"')
cmd = %Q~curl -X PUT http://127.0.0.1:5984/mydb/#{curr_id} -d "#{data}"~
puts cmd
`#{cmd}`
end
Destroy (delete) and recreate production database (I did this in futon)
Replicate
curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:5984/_replicate -d '{"target":"http://server.com:5984/mydb", "source":"http://127.0.0.1:5984/mydb"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json"
Restart app