Rails to_s机械师

Question

Hey guys this has been tripping me up quite a bit. So here is the general problem:

I am writing an application that requires users to enter their Summoner Names from league of legends. I do a pretty simple data scrape of a match and enter the data into my database. Unfortunately I am having some errors registering users with "special characters".

For this example I will use one problem user: RIÇK

As you can see RICK != RIÇK. So when I do the data scrub from the site I get the correct value which I push onto an array for later use.

Once I need the player names I pull from the array as follows: (player_names is the array)

@temp_player = User.find_by_username(player_names[i].to_s) 

The problem is the users with any special characters are not being pulled. Should I not be using find_by? Is to_s changing my original values? I am really quite lost on what to do and would greatly appreciate any help / advice.

Thanks in advance,

Dan

Answer 1

I would like to thank Brian Kung for the link to the following: joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html It does a great job giving the bare minimum a programmer truly needs to understand.

For my particular issue I had used a HTML scraper to get the contents but which kept HTML entries throughout. When using these with my SQL lookups it was obvious that things were not being found. In order to fix this I used the HTMLEntities Gem to decode the text as follows (as soon as I put the into the array originally):

requires 'RubyGems' #without this cannot include htmlentries as a gem
requires 'HTMLEntries' 

coder = HTMLEntries.new

line = '<'
player_names.push(coder.decode(line))

The Takeaway

When working with text and if running into errors I would strongly recommend tracing the strings you are working with to the origin and truly understanding what encoding is being used in each process. By doing this you can easily find where things are going wrong.