Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord, Postgres, UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT encodings -

weirdest error, who’s challenge try , me? spent hours yesterday on , it’s magic. can't believe happening , it's driving me crazy.

btw, using:

• rails 4.2.3
• ruby 2.2.3
• pg 0.18
• encoding.default_internal = encoding.default_external = utf-8
• config.encoding = 'utf-8'

it has postgres, activerecord , encodings! turns out we’ve been getting these errors whenever create new users on database special characters:

encoding::undefinedconversionerror: "\xc3" ascii-8bit utf-8

\xc3 may vary depending on characters. weird part we’ve set since beginning utf-8. makes no sense , digged it, , used script:

user.all.each   |user| user.attributes.each     |name, value| if value.is_a? string       puts user.email + name.encoding.to_s + value.encoding.to_s     end   end end 

and output of 1 of users, users same:

dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8utf-8 dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8ascii-8bit dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8ascii-8bit dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8ascii-8bit dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8utf-8 dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8utf-8 dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8utf-8 dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8utf-8 dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8utf-8 dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8utf-8 dr_lottahelp@blahblah.comutf-8utf-8 

turns out 3 fields ascii-8bit encoding. absolutely makes no sense me!

(those fields btw, first_name, middle_name, last_name, same in database other text fields got listed on output, don't special treatment).

another funny thing if don't fill of fields, encoding utf-8 value. once fill it, if don't use special characters converted ascii-8bit.

any suggestions? i've tried every single thing.

thank you.

okay, in case had gem crypt_keeper. if using special unicode characters such ´, have explicitly tell gem use utf-8 encode, otherwise store values on database ascii-8bit.

wish got better error message know caused because of that, same problem see someday!