“\xC2” from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

Question

I'm trying to run a Ruby on Rails application on my Ubuntu 12.04 server. I have successfully started the Rails server, but when I open it in my browser as localhost:3000 , it shows me the following error:

Encoding::UndefinedConversionError in PagesController#index

"\xC2" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8
Rails.root: /home/tarun/tarun-webapp

Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace
app/controllers/application_controller.rb:21:in `jammit'
Request

Parameters:

None
Show session dump

Show env dump

Response

Headers:

None

Here is index method of pages_controller.rb

class PagesController < ApplicationController
        layout false

  def index
        @user_session = UserSession.new
        @user = User.new
    if current_user
      redirect_to user_root_url
    end
  end

How can I resolve this error?

Answer 1

Most likely LANG=C or locale is unset.

Can also try something like this_should_be_a_unicode_string = this_should_be_a_unicode_string.force_encoding('UTF-8')

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.1/Encoding.html