I am trying to populate the movie object, but when parsing through the u.item
file I get this error:
`split': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError)
File.open("Data/u.item", "r") do |infile|
while line = infile.gets
line = line.split("|")
end
end
The error occurs only when trying to split the lines with fancy international punctuation.
Here's a sample
543|Misérables, Les (1995)|01-Jan-1995||http://us.imdb.com/M/title-exact?Mis%E9rables%2C%20Les%20%281995%29|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|0|0|0
Is there a work around??
I had to force the encoding of each line to iso-8859-1
(which is the European character set)... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1
a=[]
IO.foreach("u.item") {|x| a << x}
m=[]
a.each_with_index {|line,i| x=line.force_encoding("iso-8859-1").split("|"); m[i]=x}
Ruby is somewhat sensitive to character encoding issues. You can do a number of things that might solve your problem. For example:
Put an encoding comment at the top of your source file.
# encoding: utf-8
Explicitly encode your line before splitting.
line = line.encode('UTF-8').split("|")
Replace invalid characters, instead of raising an Encoding::InvalidByteSequenceError exception.
line.encode('UTF-8', :invalid => :replace).split("|")
Give these suggestions a shot, and update your question if none of them work for you. Hope it helps!