broken UTF-8 String ruby

Question

While reading a file I get broken UTF-8 String error whenever I have the following in my file

través

if I change it to normal e then it works.

Whats the way to fix this?

error only happens if I do line.lstrp or any other function. Just printing the lines is ok.

problem even happens when I try to match the string with regex.

Answer 1

Obviously your file is not UTF-8 encoded. So, you should either take care of that (save your file using UTF-8), or tell Ruby that your strings aren't going to be UTF-8. In order to do that, you can either

• use -E encoding command line switch for that
• pass -E encoding using RUBYOPT environment variable
• specify encoding within Ruby comment
• do force_encoding method on already loaded string before operation such as lstrp

There's a lot of Ruby encoding-related reading on following blog:

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/understanding_m17n