Ruby on Rails 3 => truncate method with special characters throws Encoding Incompatability error

I need some help with the following. I got a string here which contains special characters e.g. ë, é etc. I can display them correctly in my view but once I call the truncate metho开发者_开发百科d, it throws the following error:

incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8

The weird thing is that, when I inspect the encoding of the truncated string, it does give me UTF-8, which is what I need (and UTF-8 is used for my database).

my_string_with_special_characters.truncate(35).encoding.inspect

=> UTF-8

But is is when I call: <%= my_string_with_special_characters.truncate(35) %>

=> incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8

I have also tried the magic_encoding gem which prepends the magic comment "encoding : utf-8" in all of my controller files, but I still got the incompatible character encoding error.

If anyone knows how to solve this, let me know. Much appreciated.

Alex

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Try to use this string in the beginning of you file (for *.rb files)

# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-