[Rails] incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

Ruby on Rails Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Hello you all, hope you're all having some nice holidays! :p

Here is the deal with me: incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

I used a seed (https://github.com/celsodantas/br_populate) to populate my DB with cities and states of my country, so I can fill a select box for registering, but when I try to exhibit it I get this error:

incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

this is one of my select_boxes:

<%= f.collection_select(:birth_state, State.all, :id, :name, {:prompt => "State"}, {:class=> 'form-control'}) %>

And also I'm using a mysql database, with the mysql gem, and I have seen some records like:

Making me think it's a problem cause of special portuguese characters like ç, á, à, ã... I have heard also that mysql/rails doesn't convert automatically the encodings or something like that, but honestly I have no clue on how doing that. If anyone got a clue, happy to hear it.

Thank you all in advance!

Happy holidays,

Diego Dillenburg Bueno

Graduando em Ciências da Computação

UNESP - Rio Claro

(12) 98116-7741