As we know we can use Iconv in Ruby 1.9.3 with TRANSLIT flag which will replace accented characters with their ASCII equivalents, only if they're not present in destination encoding.
Example of use:
require 'iconv'
z = "Håkan"
Iconv.conv("windows-1250//TRANSLIT", "UTF-8", z)
# => outputs "Hakan" (with diactric removed)
pl = "zażółć"
Iconv.conv("windows-1250//TRANSLIT", "UTF-8", pl)
# => outputs "zażółć" (because windows-1250 contains all this characters)
# well, to be honest it outputs "za\xBF\xF3\xB3\xE6" because of terminal settings
# but I hope you understand
However Iconv is deprecated and it's recommended to use String#encode instead.
However when using #encode the problem arises:
z.encode('windows-1250', 'utf-8')
Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: U+00E5 to WINDOWS-1250 in conversion from UTF-8 to WINDOWS-1250
Is there any way to get behavior similar to one with iconv TRANSLIT flag using String#encode instead in Ruby 2+?
If you know what to expect, then you can specify the replacements in a hash:
z = "Håkan"
p z.encode('windows-1250', 'utf-8', fallback: {"å"=>"a"}) # => Hakan
Related
Since ruby 1.9, CSV uses a parser that can perform encoding, if you use methods like:
::foreach, ::open, ::read, and ::readlines.
For example: CSV.read('path/to/file', encoding: "windows-1252:UTF-8") tries to read a file in windows-1252 and returns an array with utf-8 encoded strings.
If the encode conversion between charsets has undefined characters it gives an Encoding::UndefinedConversionError.
The String.encode method has some nice args to deal with this undefined characters:
str = str.encode('UTF-8', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: "" )
Is there a way to use this kind of replace rules for undefined conversions between charsets with CSV parser?
Thank you.
There is, indeed, a way. The trick is to define a custom converter that does the conversion you want using String#encode. Converters are run before CSV tries to do its automatic conversion to UTF-8. We pass the custom converter to CSV.read as the :converters option, along with the original :encoding:
UTF8_CONVERTER = ->(field) { field.encode('utf-8', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: "") }
CSV.read('foo.csv', encoding: 'windows-1252', converters: UTF8_CONVERTER)
Since there aren't any characters in Windows-1252 that aren't also in UTF-8, I'll demonstrate the other way around. Suppose you have this UTF-8 CSV file:
foo,bar
yes👍,no💩
And suppose I want to convert it to ASCII-8BIT (because reasons?). This gives me an error:
CSV.read('emoji.csv', encoding: 'utf-8:ascii-8bit')
# => Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: U+1F44D from UTF-8 to ASCII-8BIT
But if I define a custom converter that replaces those undefined characters, it works perfectly:
ASCII_CONVERTER = ->(field) { field.encode('ascii-8bit', replace: "#") }
CSV.read('emoji.csv', encoding: 'utf-8', converters: ASCII_CONVERTER)
# => [ [ "foo", "bar" ],
# [ "yes#", "no#"] ]
(Note that encoding: 'utf-8' isn't strictly necessary here, since UTF-8 is the default, but it will be necessary if your file has a different encoding.)
If you want to use the replace behavior of String#encode, you will either have to encode the whole file content with it or do it line by line. You will lose information with this.
This is one way of doing it though:
file = File.open('path/to/file.csv')
file.each do |line|
# keep in mind that the first parameter here is the destination encoding,
# the second is the source encoding
sanitized_line = line.encode('UTF-8', 'windows-1252', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: '')
fields_array = CSV.parse_line(sanitized_line)
# do whatever you want with the fields you extracted
end
If your conversion from one encoding to another is pretty much guaranteed to not loose information (iso-8859-1 to utf-8 for example) I would really recommend to simply convert the file on reading.
Another thing to keep in mind is, that ruby does not try to figure out the encoding of a file you are reading on it's own. If you omit the parameter it only uses the default encoding for it's external and internal encoding. So you have to specify the encoding the file is in yourself. Ruby has no really reliable way of doing this, so in my case I ended up doing this (on a Ubuntu system):
encoding = `file --mime-encoding #{path_to_file} | awk '{print $2}'`.strip
arr_of_arrs = CSV.read(path_to_file, encoding: "#{encoding}:utf-8")
I am trying to convert a string from ISO-8859-1 encoding to UTF-8 but I can't seem to get it work. Here is an example of what I have done in irb.
irb(main):050:0> string = 'Norrlandsvägen'
=> "Norrlandsvägen"
irb(main):051:0> string.force_encoding('iso-8859-1')
=> "Norrlandsv\xC3\xA4gen"
irb(main):052:0> string = string.encode('utf-8')
=> "Norrlandsvägen"
I am not sure why Norrlandsvägen in iso-8859-1 will be converted into Norrlandsvägen in utf-8.
I have tried encode, encode!, encode(destinationEncoding, originalEncoding), iconv, force_encoding, and all kinds of weird work-arounds I could think of but nothing seems to work. Can someone please help me/point me in the right direction?
Ruby newbie still pulling hair like crazy but feeling grateful for all the replies here... :)
Background of this question: I am writing a gem that will download an xml file from some websites (which will have iso-8859-1 encoding) and save it in a storage and I would like to convert it to utf-8 first. But words like Norrlandsvägen keep messing me up. Really any help would be greatly appreciated!
[UPDATE]: I realized running tests like this in the irb console might give me different behaviors so here is what I have in my actual code:
def convert_encoding(string, originalEncoding)
puts "#{string.encoding}" # ASCII-8BIT
string.encode(originalEncoding)
puts "#{string.encoding}" # still ASCII-8BIT
string.encode!('utf-8')
end
but the last line gives me the following error:
Encoding::UndefinedConversionError - "\xC3" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8
Thanks to #Amadan's answer below, I noticed that \xC3 actually shows up in irb if you run:
irb(main):001:0> string = 'ä'
=> "ä"
irb(main):002:0> string.force_encoding('iso-8859-1')
=> "\xC3\xA4"
I have also tried to assign a new variable to the result of string.encode(originalEncoding) but got an even weirder error:
newString = string.encode(originalEncoding)
puts "#{newString.encoding}" # can't even get to this line...
newString.encode!('utf-8')
and the error is Encoding::UndefinedConversionError - "\xC3" to UTF-8 in conversion from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1
I am still quite lost in all of this encoding mess but I am really grateful for all the replies and help everyone has given me! Thanks a ton! :)
You assign a string, in UTF-8. It contains ä. UTF-8 represents ä with two bytes.
string = 'ä'
string.encoding
# => #<Encoding:UTF-8>
string.length
# 1
string.bytes
# [195, 164]
Then you force the bytes to be interpreted as if they were ISO-8859-1, without actually changing the underlying representation. This does not contain ä any more. It contains two characters, Ã and ¤.
string.force_encoding('iso-8859-1')
# => "\xC3\xA4"
string.length
# 2
string.bytes
# [195, 164]
Then you translate that into UTF-8. Since this is not reinterpretation but translation, you keep the two characters, but now encoded in UTF-8:
string = string.encode('utf-8')
# => "ä"
string.length
# 2
string.bytes
# [195, 131, 194, 164]
What you are missing is the fact that you originally don't have an ISO-8859-1 string, as you would from your Web-service - you have gibberish. Fortunately, this is all in your console tests; if you read the response of the website using the proper input encoding, it should all work okay.
For your console test, let's demonstrate that if you start with a proper ISO-8859-1 string, it all works:
string = 'Norrlandsvägen'.encode('iso-8859-1')
# => "Norrlandsv\xE4gen"
string = string.encode('utf-8')
# => "Norrlandsvägen"
EDIT For your specific problem, this should work:
require 'net/https'
uri = URI.parse("https://rusta.easycruit.com/intranet/careerbuilder_se/export/xml/full")
options = {
:use_ssl => uri.scheme == 'https',
:verify_mode => OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
}
response = Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port, options) do |https|
https.request(Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.path))
end
body = response.body.force_encoding('ISO-8859-1').encode('UTF-8')
There's a difference between force_encoding and encode. The former sets the encoding for the string, whereas the latter actually transcodes the contents of the string to the new encoding. Consequently, the following code causes your problem:
string = "Norrlandsvägen"
string.force_encoding('iso-8859-1')
puts string.encode('utf-8') # Norrlandsvägen
Whereas the following code will actually correctly encode your contents:
string = "Norrlandsvägen".encode('iso-8859-1')
string.encode!('utf-8')
Here's an example running in irb:
irb(main):023:0> string = "Norrlandsvägen".encode('iso-8859-1')
=> "Norrlandsv\xE4gen"
irb(main):024:0> string.encoding
=> #<Encoding:ISO-8859-1>
irb(main):025:0> string.encode!('utf-8')
=> "Norrlandsvägen"
irb(main):026:0> string.encoding
=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>
The above answer was spot on. Specifically this point here:
There's a difference between force_encoding and encode. The former
sets the encoding for the string, whereas the latter actually
transcodes the contents of the string to the new encoding.
In my situation, I had a text file with iso-8859-1 encoding. By default, Ruby uses UTF-8 encoding, so if you were to try to read the file without specifying the encoding, then you would get an error:
results = File.read(file)
results.encoding
=> #<Encoding:UTF-8>
results.split("\r\n")
ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8
You get an invalid byte sequence error because the characters in different encodings are represented by different byte lengths. Consequently, you would need to specify the encoding to the File API. Think of it like force_encoding:
results = File.read(file, encoding: "iso-8859-1")
So everything is good right? No, not if you want to start parsing the iso-8859-1 string with UTF-8 character encodings:
results = File.read(file, encoding: "iso-8859-1")
results.each do |line|
puts line.split('¬')
end
Encoding::CompatibilityError: incompatible character encodings: ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8
Why this error? Because '¬' is represented as UTF-8. You are using a UTF-8 character sequence against an ISO-8859-1 string. They are incompatible encodings. Consequently, after you read the File as a ISO-8859-1, then you can ask Ruby to encode that ISO-8859-1 into a UTF-8. And now you will be working with UTF-8 strings and thus no problems:
results = File.read(file, encoding: "iso-8859-1").encode('UTF-8')
results.encoding
results = results.split("\r\n")
results.each do |line|
puts line.split('¬')
end
Ultimately, with some Ruby APIs, you do not need to use force_encoding('ISO-8859-1'). Instead, you just specify the expected encoding to the API. However, you must convert it back to UTF-8 if you plan to parse it with UTF-8 strings.
I want to select dropdown having text="Côte d'Ivoire".
ie.select_list(:id, "name01").select("#{text}")
I tried these codes,
1.encoding: UTF-8 #not working
2.text.force_encoding("ASCII-8BIT").encode('UTF-8', undef: :replace, replace:'')
#text=Cte d'Ivoire
what should I do for it?
I also want to save this text to my DB.Please help.
If you know the string is UTF-8 encoded, why not just force encoding to UTF-8?
#encoding: ASCII-8BIT
str = "C\xC3\xB4te d'Ivoire" # => "C\xC3\xB4te d'Ivoire"
str.encoding # => #<Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>
str.force_encoding('UTF-8')
str # => "Côte d'Ivoire"
str.encoding # => #<Encoding:UTF-8>
If you are using Côte d'Ivoire as a literal anywhere in your Ruby source files, be sure to add
#encoding: UTF-8
as the first line of the file to tell Ruby that the file is UTF-8 encoded.
I would have expected your solutions to work, unless the software you are using to save/execute the files is overriding the setting. I recall having that issue with NetBeans.
An alternative, if you cannot fix the actual encoding, is to use a regex to match just the standard characters.
text = /C.te d'Ivoire/
browser.select_list.select(text)
The regex has replaced all accented characters with a ..
Not a great solution, but perhaps a solution if nothing else works.
This is what I was doing:
csv = CSV.open(file_name, "r")
I used this for testing:
line = csv.shift
while not line.nil?
puts line
line = csv.shift
end
And I ran into this:
ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8
I read the answer here and this is what I tried
csv = CSV.open(file_name, "r", encoding: "windows-1251:utf-8")
I ran into the following error:
Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: "\x98" to UTF-8 in conversion from Windows-1251 to UTF-8
Then I came across a Ruby gem - charlock_holmes. I figured I'd try using it to find the source encoding.
CharlockHolmes::EncodingDetector.detect(File.read(file_name))
=> {:type=>:text, :encoding=>"windows-1252", :confidence=>37, :language=>"fr"}
So I did this:
csv = CSV.open(file_name, "r", encoding: "windows-1252:utf-8")
And still got this:
Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: "\x8F" to UTF-8 in conversion from Windows-1252 to UTF-8
It looks like you have problem with detecting the valid encoding of your file. CharlockHolmes provide you with useful tip of :confidence=>37 which simply means the detected encoding may not be the right one.
Basing on error messages and test_transcode.rb from https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/blob/master/test-mri/test/ruby/test_transcode.rb I found the encoding that passes through both of your error messages. With help of String#encode it's easy to test:
"\x8F\x98".encode("UTF-8","cp1256") # => "ڈک"
Your issue looks like strictly related to the file and not to ruby.
In case we are not sure which encoding to use and can agree to loose some character we can use :invalid and :undef params for String#encode, in this case:
"\x8F\x98".encode("UTF-8", "CP1250",:invalid => :replace, :undef => :replace, :replace => "?") # => "Ź?"
other way is to use Iconv *//IGNORE option for target encoding:
Iconv.iconv("UTF-8//IGNORE","CP1250", "\x8F\x98")
As a source encoding suggestion of CharlockHolmes should be pretty good.
PS. String.encode was introduced in ruby 1.9. With ruby 1.8 you can use Iconv
the question is that the title say! who can tell me how do this in ruby!
~ UPDATE ~
ruby-iconv has been superseded from Ruby 1.9.3 onwards by the encode method. See
Jörg W Mittag's answer for details, but in short:
utf8string = "èàòppè"
iso_string = utf8string.encode('ISO-8859-1')
I agree with Williham Totlandt in thinking that this type of conversion might not be the smartest idea ever, but anyway: use ruby-iconv :)
utf8string = "èàòppè"
iso_string = Iconv.conv 'iso8859-1', 'UTF-8', utf8string
With Ruby 1.9, that's particularly easy, because all strings carry their encoding with them:
# coding: UTF-8
u = 'µ'
As you can see, the string is encoded as UTF-8:
p u.encoding # => #<Encoding:UTF-8>
p u.bytes.to_a # => [194, 181]
Transcoding the string is quite easy:
i = u.encode('ISO-8859-1')
i is now in ISO-8859-1 encoding:
p i.encoding # => #<Encoding:ISO8859-1>
p i.bytes.to_a # => [181]
If you want to write to a file, the network, an IO stream or the console, it gets even easier. In Ruby 1.9, those objects are tagged with an encoding just like strings are, and transcoding happens automatically. Just say print or puts and Ruby will do the transcoding for you:
File.open('test.txt', 'w', encoding: 'ISO-8859-1') do |f|
f.puts u
end