"Invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)" error for ä, ü, ö, ß which are Ascii!

My application needs to handle some international characters, namely ä, ü, ö and ß, which are still ascii.

When I tested the behavior of ruby when dealing with these chars, I got this error:

test.rb:1: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)
test.rb:1: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)

for this code:

puts "i like my chars: ä, ü, ö and ß!"

But the strange thing is: When using the Interactive Ruby Shell, I get no error!

EDIT: 开发者_C百科In my application, I'm retrieving the data from an external api. The above code is just an example!

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No, those characters aren't in ASCII. ASCII doesn't have any values above Unicode U+007F (decimal 127). See the wikipedia ASCII entry for more details.

I suspect the interactive Ruby shell is taking the native encoding of your shell, rather than ASCII.

Do you have a way of specifying the encoding of your .rb file? If so, use that - or change your scripts so they genuinely are ASCII.

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Put the magic comment # coding: utf-8 at the beginning your your script (on the second line if you're using shebang).

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
# coding: utf-8

puts "i like my chars: ä, ü, ö and ß!"

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Those are not ASCII characters… They just happen to still be encoded in one byte in some legacy, ASCII-derived character sets. Most likely what is happening is that your source file is being saved as UTF-8 because it contains non-ASCII characters, and ruby is correctly handling this.

You're only getting away with it at the interactive prompt because your terminal is using some legacy character encoding.

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To escape the characters for the ASCII encoding, use Unicode escape sequences:

puts "i like my chars: \u00E4, \u00FC, \u00F6 and \u00DF!"

Ruby 1.9, anyway - I can't remember if this works in 1.8.

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What worked for me is removing the shebang line and running the script directly from ruby19 under macosx:

GreyJewel:Moralytics atma$ head -n1 moralytics 
**# coding: utf-8**
GreyJewel:Moralytics atma$ which ruby
/opt/local/bin/ruby
GreyJewel:Moralytics atma$ ruby --version
ruby 1.9.3p0 (2011-10-30 revision 33570) [x86_64-darwin11]
GreyJewel:Moralytics atma$ ruby moralytics 
Το λεξικό που χρησιμοποιούμε έχει: 407117 λέξεις
Το λεξιλόγειο του χρήστη atmat εμπεριέχει: 3943 λέξεις συνολικά.

That worked. Using shebang causes the error. I can't tell for sure why.

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Add a magic comment in the script where you use non-ascii chars? It should go on top of the script.

# encoding: utf-8

It worked for me like charm.

Or if you want to make the project wide, you have an option of magic-encoding gem