I'm running a script on WSL Debian which fetches Windows files from a locally mounted share drive. Issue is that the file names are wrongly encoded, even-though #encoding returns #<Encoding:UTF-8>. Example:
"J\u00E9r\u00E9my".encoding # #<Encoding:UTF-8>
\u00E9 is the Unicode character for é, so I assume that the encoding is Unicode
I've tried several encoding combination from related questions (Convert a unicode string to characters in Ruby?, How to convert a string to UTF8 in Ruby), but none of the fit my needs.
I've also tried different "magic comments" encoding: <ENCODING>, without satisfying result.
What's your methodology to identify and fix encoding issues ?
Edit1: Stefan asked for codepoints:
"J\u00E9r\u00E9my".each_codepoint.to_a
# [74, 233, 114, 233, 109, 121]
and Encoding.default_external
Encoding.default_external
# #<Encoding:US_ASCII>
Which surprises me, as I've the magic comment # encoding: utf-8 at the top of my file
Edit2: explicitely setting default_internal and default_external encoding to Encoding::UTF_8 fixes the problem
# encoding: utf-8
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
Though I'd like to go further and actually understand why this is required
"J\u00E9r\u00E9my".encoding
#=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>
"J\u00E9r\u00E9my".each_codepoint.to_a
#=> [74, 233, 114, 233, 109, 121]
The strings are perfectly fine. They contain the correct bytes and have the correct encoding.
They are printed this way because your external encoding is set to (or recognised as) US-ASCII:
Encoding.default_external
#=> #<Encoding:US_ASCII>
Ruby assumes that your terminal can only render ASCII characters and therefore prints UTF-8 characters using escape sequences. (when using p / String#inspect)
The external encoding is usually determined automatically based on your locale:
$ LANG=C ruby -e 'p Encoding.default_external'
#<Encoding:US-ASCII>
$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 ruby -e 'p Encoding.default_external'
#<Encoding:UTF-8>
Setting your terminal's or system's encoding / locale to UTF-8 should fix the problem.
Related
Ruby seems a bit inconsistent in its handling of encodings:
irb -E BINARY:BINARY
irb(main):001:0> "hi".encoding
=> #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>
So that "works". Now what about plain ruby?
ruby -E BINARY:BINARY -e 'p "hi".encoding'
#<Encoding:US-ASCII>
That doesn't work. Furthermore, when p "hi".encoding is placed in x.rb, the output of ruby -E BINARY:BINARY x.rb is:
#<Encoding:UTF-8>
How do I get ASCII-8BIT literals when invoking ruby?
String literals have the same encoding as the script encoding. Instead of 'hi'.encoding you can use the keyword __ENCODING__ to retrieve it. The script encoding can be changed by putting a magic comment at the beginning of your script:
# encoding: ASCII-8BIT
p __ENCODING__ # => #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>
The -E flag of ruby doesn't affect the encoding of string literals. It's only for changing the external and internal encoding. You can read about the various type of encodings and their purpose in the Encoding documentation.
Back to the encoding of string literals: Even though irb claims its -E flag is the "Same as ruby -E" that isn't true. It uses the external encoding as script encoding. irb already has several limitations. This could be one of them. It's at least a documentation bug.
Besides the magic comment there's another discouraged way to set the script encoding via ruby: the -K flag and the n (none) kcode. ruby -Kne "p __ENCODING__" should print #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>. However -K also changes the external encoding.
According to Mac OSX, I have a file with ISO-8859 encoding:
$ file filename.txt
filename.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF line terminators
I try to read it with that encoding:
> filename = "/Users/myuser/Downloads/filename.txt"
> content = File.read(filename, encoding: "ISO-8859")
> content.encoding
=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>
It doesn't work. And consequently:
> content.split("\n")
ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8
Why doesn't it read the file as ISO-8859?
With your code, Ruby emits the following warning when reading the file:
warning: Unsupported encoding ISO-8859 ignored
This is because there is not only one ISO 8859 encoding but actually quite a bunch of variants. You need to specify the correct one explicitly, e.g
content = File.read(filename, encoding: "ISO-8859-1")
# or equivalently
content = File.read(filename, encoding: Encoding::ISO_8859_1)
When dealing with text files produced in Windows machines (which is hinted by the CRLF line endings), you might want to use Encoding:::Windows_1252 (resp. "Windows-1252") instead. This is a superset of ISO 8859-1 and used to be the default encoding used by many Windows programs and the system itself.
Try to use Encoding::ISO_8859_1 instead.
I am currently trying to write a script that iterates over an input file and checks data on a website. If it finds the new data, it prints out to the terminal that it passes, if it doesn't it tells me it fails. And vice versa for deleted data. It was working fine until the input file I was given contains the "™" character. Then when ruby gets to that line, it is spitting out an error:
PDAPWeb.rb:73:in `include?': incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and IBM437
(Encoding::CompatibilityError)
The offending line is a simple check to see if the text exists on the page.
if browser.text.include? (program_name)
Where the program_name variable is a parsed piece of information from the input file. In this instance, the program_name contains the 'TM' character mentioned before.
After some research I found that adding the line # encoding: utf-8 to the beginning of my script could help, but so far has not proven useful.
I added this to my program_name variable to see if it would help(and it allowed my script to run without errors), but now it is not properly finding the TM character when it should be.
program_name = record[2].gsub("\n", '').force_encoding("utf-8").encode("IBM437", replace: nil)
This seemed to convert the TM character to this: Γäó
I thought maybe i had IBM437 and utf-8 parts reversed, so I tried the opposite
program_name = record[2].gsub("\n", '').force_encoding("IBM437").encode("utf-8", replace: nil)
and am now receiving this error when attempting to run the script
PDAPWeb.rb:48:in `encode': U+2122 from UTF-8 to IBM437 (Encoding::UndefinedConve
rsionError)
I am using ruby 1.9.3p392 (2013-02-22) and I'm not sure if I should upgrade as this is the standard version installed in my company.
Is my encoding incorrect and causing it to convert the TM character with errors?
Here’s what it looks like is going on. Your input file contains a ™ character, and it is in UTF-8 encoding. However when you read it, since you don’t specify the encoding, Ruby assumes it is in your system’s default encoding of IBM437 (you must be on Windows).
This is basically the same as this:
>> input = "™"
=> "™"
>> input.encoding
=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>
>> input.force_encoding 'ibm437'
=> "\xE2\x84\xA2"
Note that force_encoding doesn’t change the actual string, just the label associated with it. This is the same outcome as in your case, only you arrive here via a different route (by reading the file).
The web page also has a ™ symbol, and is also encoded as UTF-8, but in this case Ruby has the encoding correct (Watir probably uses the headers from the page):
>> web_page = '™'
=> "™"
>> web_page.encoding
=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>
Now when you try to compare these two strings you get the compatibility error, because they have different encodings:
>> web_page.include? input
Encoding::CompatibilityError: incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and IBM437
from (irb):11:in `include?'
from (irb):11
from /Users/matt/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.1/bin/irb:11:in `<main>'
If either of the two strings only contained ASCII characters (i.e. code points less that 128) then this comparison would have worked. Both UTF-8 and IBM437 are both supersets of ASCII, and are only incompatible if they both contain characters outside of the ASCII range. This is why you only started seeing this behaviour when the input file had a ™.
The fix is to inform Ruby what the actual encoding of the input file is. You can do this with the already loaded string:
>> input.force_encoding 'utf-8'
=> "™"
You can also do this when reading the file, e.g. (there are a few ways of reading files, they all should allow you to explicitly specify the encoding):
input = File.read("input_file.txt", :encoding => "utf-8")
# now input will be in the correct encoding
Note in both of these the string isn’t being changed, it still contains the same bytes, but Ruby now knows its correct encoding.
Now the comparison should work okay:
>> web_page.include? input
=> true
There is no need to encode the string. Here’s what happens if you do. First if you correct the encoding to UTF-8 then encode to IBM437:
>> input.force_encoding("utf-8").encode("IBM437", replace: nil)
Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: U+2122 from UTF-8 to IBM437
from (irb):16:in `encode'
from (irb):16
from /Users/matt/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.1/bin/irb:11:in `<main>'
IBM437 doesn’t include the ™ character, so you can’t encode a string containing it to this encoding without losing data. By default Ruby raises an exception when this happens. You can force the encoding by using the :undef option, but the symbol is lost:
>> input.force_encoding("utf-8").encode("IBM437", :undef => :replace)
=> "?"
If you go the other way, first using force_encoding to IBM437 then encoding to UTF-8 you get the string Γäó:
>> input.force_encoding("IBM437").encode("utf-8", replace: nil)
=> "Γäó"
The string is already in IBM437 encoding as far as Ruby is concerned, so force_encoding doesn’t do anything. The UTF-8 representation of ™ is the three bytes 0xe2 0x84 0xa2, and when interpreted as IBM437 these bytes correspond to the three characters seen here which are then converted into their UTF-8 representations.
(These two outcomes are the other way round from what you describe in the question, hence my comment above. I’m assuming that this is just a copy-and-paste error.)
Is it true that Ruby Strings are just a sequence of Unicode characters? If so, what specific encoding e.g. is it UTF-8, etc.?
The default encoding of a String is the same as the source file.
The default encoding of the source file is UTF-8 in Ruby 2.0 or later, or US-ASCII in Ruby 1.9 or earlier. You can specify the encoding by adding
# encoding: utf-8
in the beginning of a source file.
By default, Ruby strings are indeed UTF-8, as can be verified by the String#encoding method:
llama#llama:~$ irb
irb(main):001:0> 'foo'.encoding
=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>
You can get a list of available encodings via Encoding::list:
irb(main):002:0> Encoding.list
=> [#<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>, #<Encoding:UTF-8>, #<Encoding:US-ASCII>, (etc...)]
And change the encoding of a string with String#force_encoding:
irb(main):003:0> 'foo'.force_encoding(Encoding::US_ASCII).encoding
=> #<Encoding:US-ASCII>
I'm writing a Ruby script to process a large text file, and keep getting an odd encoding error.
Here's the situation:
input_data = File.new(in_path, 'r').read
p input_data.encoding.name # UTF-8
break_char = "\r".encode("UTF-8")
p break_char # "\r"
p break_char.encoding.name # "UTF-8"
input_data.split(",".encode("UTF-8"))
p Encoding.compatible?(input_data, break_char) # # Encoding:UTF-8>
This produces the error :in 'split': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError)
I read http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string and looked at other solutions to apparently the same problem, but still can't work out why it's happening when I believe I am controlling the encodings.
I'm on OSX working with ruby 1.9.2
Obviously your input file is not UTF-8 (or at least, not entirely). If you don't care about non-ascii characters, you can simply assume your file is ascii-8bit encoded. BTW, your separator (break_char) is not causing problems as comma is encoded the same way in UTF-8 as in ASCII.
fname = 'test.in'
# create example file and fill it with invalid UTF-8 sequence
File.open(fname, 'w') do |f|
f.write "\xc3\x28"
end
# then try to read and parse it
s = File.open(fname) do |f| # file opened as UTF-8
#s = File.open(fname, 'r:ascii-8bit') do |f| # file opened as ascii-8bit
f.read
end
p s.split ','
I fail to get an error here on Linux even when the input file is not UTF-8. (I'm using Ruby 1.9.2, as well.)
Logically, either this problem is linked with OS-X, or it's something to do with your input data. Does it happen regardless of the data in the input file?
(I realise that this is not a proper answer, but I lack the rep to add a comment. And since no-one has responded yet, I thought it better than nothing...)
You read the file using the default encoding your system provides. So ruby tags the string as utf8, which doesn't mean it's really utf8-data. Try file <input file> to guess what kind of encoding is in there, then tell ruby it's that one (unclean: force_encoding(<encoding>), clean: tell the File object what encoding it is, I don't know how to do that) and then use encode!("utf8") to convert it to utf8.
Here are 2 common situations and how to deal with them:
Situation 1
You have an UTF-8 input-file with possibly a few invalid bytes
Remove the invalid bytes:
test = "Partly valid\xE4 UTF-8 encoding: äöüß"
File.open( 'input_file', 'w' ) {|f| f.write(test)}
str = File.read( 'input_file' )
str.scrub('')
=> "Partly valid UTF-8 encoding: äöüß"
Situation 2
You have an input-file that could be in either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 encoding
Check which encoding it is and convert to UTF-8 (if necessary):
test = "String in ISO-8859-1 encoding: \xE4\xF6\xFC\xDF"
File.open( 'input_file', 'w' ) {|f| f.write(test)}
str = File.read( 'input_file' )
unless str.valid_encoding?
str.encode!( 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', invalid: :replace )
end #unless
=> "String in ISO-8859-1 encoding: äöüß"
Notes
The above code snippets assume that Ruby encodes all your strings in UTF-8 by default. Even though, this is almost always the case, you can make sure of this by starting your scripts with # encoding: UTF-8.
If invalid, it is programmatically possible to detect most multi-byte encodings like UTF-8 (in Ruby, see: #valid_encoding?). However, it is NOT possible (or at least extremely hard) to programmatically detect invalidity of single-byte-encodings like ISO-8859-1. Thus the above code snippet does not work the other way around, i.e. detecting if a String is valid ISO-8859-1 encoding.
Even though UTF-8 has become increasingly popular as the default encoding in computer-systems, ISO-8859-1 and other Latin1 flavors are still very popular in the Western countries, especially in North America. Be aware that there a several single-byte encodings out there that are very similar, but slightly vary from ISO-8859-1. Examples: CP1252 (a.k.a. Windows-1252), ISO-8859-15
[ruby] [encoding] [utf8] [file-encoding] [character-encoding]
Please try this one:-
input_data = File.open("path/your_file.pdf", "rb") {|io| io.read}
Thanks