How to allow right to left languages in Ruby on Rails 3 - ruby-on-rails-3

I am interested in creating a website in Hebrew using Ruby on Rails 3. The problem is when I put Hebrew into my view I am told that it is not supported and I should add UTF-8.
I've been working on this for a while and I Can't seem to find how to do this. I am also using Sqlite3 and I would like to save Hebrew strings there too.
How would I achieve this?
The error code I am given is:
Your template was not saved as valid UTF-8. Please either specify UTF-8 as the encoding for your template in your text editor, or mark the template with its encoding by inserting the following as the first line of the template:...
Edit:
Problem was I was working on Notepad++ which did not save my files in UTF-8 format although they were UTF-8 formated files. Solved by changing file format.

If you are using notepad++, first set the encoding to "Encode in UTF-8" and then start coding. If you have already created/saved the file then just changing the encoding type will not do. You will have to keep a copy of the existing code, then delete the existing file, open notepad++, set the encoding first(Encode in UTF-8) and then start writing/copying the code to it. This way utf-8 encoding is ensured and you won't have to put "# encoding: UTF-8" at the top of your file.

You should try adding on the first line of your .rb files the following:
# encoding: utf-8
and on the first line of your .erb
<%# encoding: utf-8 %>
encoding: utf-8 and coding: utf-8 and are equivalent.
Hope this helps.

Make sure that in your database configurations utf-8 is the default character set, and not latin1.
If you use MySQL change it in the "MySQL Server Instance Config Wizard".
EDIT: Try putting this code in your application controller:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_filter :set_charset
def set_charset
#headers["Content-Type"] = "text/html; charset=utf-8"
end
end
read more on this article: http://www.dotmana.com/?p=95

you can put
config.encoding = "utf-8"
in your config/application.rb which is equivalent to
Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8
which in turn is the equivalent to putting:
# encoding: UTF-8
or a BOM at the top of every file.
This allows utf-8 globally on all files of the rails app.
If you want a global option on all ruby files, you can use the -Ku ruby option and set it via the RUBYOPT environment variable, like:
export RUBYOPT=-Ku

This might be caused by the file encoding itself. Make sure you have set UTF-8 as default encoding for project in your editor/IDE preferences.
Edit:
You can check file for encoding with:
file -I myview.erb.html
(that's a capital 'i').

Related

Characters not displayed correctly when reading CSV file

I have an issue when trying to read a string from a .CSV file. When I execute the application and the text is shown in a textbox, certain characters such as "é" or "ó" are shown as a question mark symbol.
The idea is that this code reads the whole CSV file and then splits each line into variables depending on the first word of the line.
The code I'm using to read is:
Dim test() As String
test = IO.File.ReadAllLines("Libro1.csv")
Dim test_chart As String = Array.Find(vls1load, Function(x) (x.StartsWith("sample")))
Dim test_chart_div() As String = test_chart.Split(";")
variable1 = test_chart_div(1)
variable2 = test_chart_div(2)
...etc
I have also tried with:
Dim test() As String
test = IO.File.ReadAllLines("Libro1.csv", System.Text.Encoding.UTF8)
But none of them works. The .csv file is supposed to be UTF8. The "web options" that you can see when saving the file in excel show encoding UTF8. I also tried the trick of changing the file extension to HTML and opening it with the browser to see that the encoding is also correct.
Can someone advice anything else I can try?
Thanks in advance.
When an Excel file is exported using the CSV Comma Separated output format, the Encoding selected in Tools -> Web Option -> Encoding of Excel's Save As... dialog doesn't actually generate the expected result:
the Text file is saved using the Encoding relative to the current Language selected in the Excel Application, not the Unicode (UTF16-LE) or UTF-8 Encoding selected (which is ignored) nor the default Encoding determined by the current System Language.
To import the CSV file, you can use the Encoding.GetEncoding() method to specify the Name or CodePage of the Encoding used in the machine that generated the file: again, not the Encoding related to System Language, but the Encoding of the Language that the Excel Application is currently using.
CodePage 1252 (Windows-1252) and ISO-8859-1 are commonly used in Latin1 zone.
Based the symbols you're referring to, this is most probably the original encoding used.
In Windows, use the former. ISO-8859-1 is still used, mostly in old Web Pages (or Web Pages created without care for the Encoding used).
As a note, CodePage 1252 and ISO-8859-1 are not exactly the same Encoding, there are subtle differences.
If you find documentation that states the opposite, the documentation is wrong.

exporting text file with utf-8 encoding in ms access

I am exporting text files from 2 queries in ms access 2010. Queries are from different linked ODBC tables (but tables are different only by data, structure and data types are same). I set up export specification to export text file in utf-8 encoding for both files. Now here come the trouble part. When I export the queries and open them in notepad, one query is in utf-8 and second one is in ANSI. I don't know how is this possible when both queires has the same export specification and it is driving me crazy.
This is my VBA code to export queries:
DoCmd.TransferText acExportDelim, "miniflow", "qry01_CZ_test", "C:\TEST_CZ.txt", no
DoCmd.TransferText acExportDelim, "miniflow", "qry01_SK_test", "C:\TEST_SK.txt", no
I also tried to modify it by adding 65001 as coding argument by the results were same.
Do you have any idea what could be wrong?
Don't rely on the File Open dialog in Notepad to tell you whether a text file is encoded as "ANSI" or UTF-8. That is just Notepad's "guess" based on whether the file begins with the bytes EF BB BF, which is the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM).
Many (most?) Windows applications will include the UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of a text file that is UTF-8 encoded. Some Unicode purists insist, often quite vigorously, that the BOM is not required for UTF-8 files and should be excluded, but that is the way Windows applications tend to behave.
Unfortunately, Access does not always follow that pattern when it exports files to text. A UTF-8 text file exported from Access may omit the BOM and that can confuse applications like Notepad if they assume that a UTF-8 encoded file will always include the BOM as the first three bytes of the file.
For a more reliable way of determining the encoding of a text file consider using an application like Notepad++ to open the file. It will differentiate between the UTF-8 files with a BOM (which it designates as "UTF-8") and UTF-8 files without a BOM (which it designates as "ANSI as UTF-8")
To illustrate, consider the following Access table
When exported to text (CSV) with UTF-8 encoding,
the File Open dialog in Notepad reports that it is encoded as "ANSI"
but a hex editor shows that it is in fact encoded as UTF-8 (the character é is encoded as C3 A9, not simply E9 as would be the case for true "ANSI" encoding)
and Notepad++ recognizes it as "ANSI as UTF-8"
in other words, a UTF-8 encoded file without a BOM.

SQL Table, Importing CSV files turns apostrophe into question mark

I have a CSV files with copy that contains apostrophes and when I import it into the database using MAMP, it turns all the apostrophes into question marks. Is there a fix for this?
Thank you in advance!
This is the result of saving your files in non UTF-8 format such as ANSI. When you open a file with text editors that don't support UTF-8 and save it again, this will happen.
Download a text editor such as Notepad++ and check and convert all your (plugin or theme) files to UTF-8 or UTF-8 Without BOM
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-fix-black-diamond-question-marks-in-wp-321
I had the same problem even when saving my CSV file as UTF-8. So in Microsoft Word, I edited the text and replaced the actual apostrophes and quotation marks with HTML code (' and ") and then copy and pasted it into my CSV file. This seemed to work for me. I used this website for the html code: http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm
For special characters that aren't importing properly you could try TSQL Bulk Insert and include either:
CODEPAGE = 'ACP' --For ANSI files
CODEPAGE = '65001' --For UTF-8 files

UTF-8 vs. ASCII-8BIT Encoding Inconsistency in Ruby on Rails

I know there are many questions about rails and encoding out there, but I haven't been able to find anything about this specific question.
I have a Ruby on Rails application using rails 3.1.3 and running under Jruby 1.6.7. We have support for both English and French - and we use the I18n library/gem to accomplish this.
Sample translation file parts:
#---- config/locales/en.yml ----
en:
button_label_verify: "Verify"
#---- config/locales/fr.yml ----
fr:
button_label_verify: "Vérifier"
In certain cases I am getting the following encoding error:
Internal Server Error: Encoding::CompatibilityError incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT
Case 1:
#---- app/views/_view_page.html.erb ----
.....
<h3><%= get_button_label() %></h3>
....
#---- app/helpers/page_helper.rb ----
def get_button_label
return I18n.t(:button_label_verify)
end
This works - there are no encoding errors and translations between French and English work just fine.
Case 2:
#---- app/views/_view_page.html.erb ----
.....
<h3><%= get_button_label() %></h3>
....
#---- app/helpers/page_helper.rb ----
def get_button_label
return "#{I18n.t(:button_label_verify)}"
end
This however does not work. The only difference is the value being returned includes strings with computed code in the string as opposed to something like
return "string " + I18n.t(:button_label_verify)
Note: The above causes no errors either - the encoding issue is only when the computed I18n translation is in the quotes.
Case 3:
#---- app/views/_view_page.html.erb ----
.....
<h3><%= "#{I18n.t(:button_label_verify)}" %></h3>
....
This causes no error... so the problem seems to somehow be related to the dynamic code (with French characters) within the string, on top of printing out a string returned from a helper function.
I know how to work around this/fix it - but what I am wondering is if anyone can provide some insight into why it is this way - is it this way for any good reason? IMO, when you get to low level - printing out a string is printing out a string, so I don't understand how one way causes and error and another way doesn't.
Putting
#encoding: utf-8
at the top of your files containing ascii-extended characters should fix encoding related issues (at elast the one coming from project files ...)
I couldn't tell why it doesn't work on a helper when using interpolation though ...
Sometimes you need to set the KCODE environment variable for the file (this is important for ruby 1.8 compatibility):
# encoding: UTF-8
$KCODE = 'UTF8' unless RUBY_VERSION >= '1.9'
It could also be that your files are not encoded in UTF-8. For that you need more than just the plaintext header. In Eclipse it is hidden under Preferences -> General -> Editors -> Spelling and for Notepad and most Windows programs when when you Save As the file. The enca command is one way of doing it on Linux but I'm sure there are others. I can't count the times I have seen a file say it is UTF-8 but it is actually some other encoding because UTF-8 functions like ASCII for 8-bit characters so you don't often notice the problem until you check the headers in a HEX editor.
Please take some time to read about file encoding:
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets
Why perl doesn't use UTF-8
Every character has a story #4: U+feff (alternate title: UTF-8 is the BOM, dude!)
This is incredibly important to get right and it can save you a lot of pain later when you port to East Asian languages (you should always plan to do this!)

Rails utf-8 problem

I there, I'm new to ruby (and rails) and having som problems when using Swedish letters in strings. In my action a create a instance variable like this:
#title = "Välkommen"
And I get the following error:
invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)
syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting keyword_end
#title = "Välkommen"
^
What's happening?
EDIT: If I add:
# coding: utf-8
at the top of my controller it works. Why is that and how can I slove this "issue"?
See Joel spolsky's article "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)".
To quote the part that answers this questions concisely
The Single Most Important Fact About Encodings
If you completely forget everything I just explained, please remember
one extremely important fact. It does not make sense to have a string
without knowing what encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your
head in the sand and pretend that "plain" text is ASCII.
This is why you must tell ruby what encoding is used in your file. Since the encoding is not marked in some sort of metadata associated with your file, some software assumed ASCII until it knows better. Ruby 1.9 probably does so until your comment when it will stop, and restart reading the file now decoding it as utf-8.
Obviously, if you used some other Unicode encoding or some more local encoding for your ruby file, you would need to change the comment to indicate the correct encoding.
The "magic comment" in Ruby 1.9 (on which Rails 3 is based) tells the interpreter what encoding to expect. It is important because in Ruby 1.9, every string has an encoding. Prior to 1.9, every string was just a sequence of bytes.
A very good description of the issue is in James Gray's series of blog posts on Ruby and Unicode. The one that is exactly relevant to your question is http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_three_default_encodings (but see the others because they are very good).
The important line from the article:
The first is the main rule of source Encodings: source files receive a US-ASCII Encoding, unless you say otherwise.
There are several places that can cause problems with utf-8 encoding.
but some tricks are to solve this problem:
make sure that every file in your project is utf-8 based (if you
are using rad rails, this is simple to accomplish: mark your project,
select properties, in the "text-file-encoding" box, select "other:
utf-8")
Be sure to put in your strange "å,ä,ö" characters in your files again
or you'll get a mysql error, because it will change your "å,ä,ö" to a
"square" (unknown character)
in your databases.yml set for each server environment (in this
example "development" with mysql)
development:
adapter: mysql
encoding: utf8
set a before filter in your application controller
(application.rb):
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_filter :set_charset
def set_charset
#headers["Content-Type"] = "text/html; charset=utf-8"
end
end
be sure to set the encoding to utf-8 in your mysql (I've only used
mysql.. so I don't know about other databases) for every table. If you
use mySQL Administrator you can do like this: edit table, press the
"table option" tab, change charset to "utf8" and collation to
"utf8_general_ci"
( Courtsey : kombatsanta )