Ruby on Rails and UTF-8

As of September 8th, 2006, UTF-8 support in Ruby and Ruby on Rails is incomplete. Many string manipulation functions in Ruby will give unexpected results when used on UTF-8 strings, as this Rails console session demonstrates:

 >> "estás".length
 => 6

However, a Rails application is still capable of accepting and outputting UTF-8 text.

Here are the current best practices:

Set your database to UTF-8

Use UTF-8 for all database tables (not strictly necessary, but will give you proper searching and sorting results):

 # database.yml

 development:
   adapter: mysql
   database: example_development
   encoding: utf8
   username: root
   password:

Set the browser to UTF-8

It's important to tell the web browser that you are outputting UTF-8. You may be tempted to add this to your layout:

 <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

However this will not work for AJAX updates to your web pages in some browsers (IE, Safari). A more complete solution is to add this to the headers of all HTTP requests:

 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

You can do this via your web server's configuration, or you can add the following to your Rails app:

 # application.rb
 after_filter :set_charset

 def set_charset
   @headers["Content-Type"] ||= "text/html; charset=UTF-8"
 end