UnSpun encoding problems

Manfred Stienstra, 07 Dec 2006, 12:44 in ruby on rails, web, broken, and unicode, last updated 07 Dec 2006, 19:59 (edit).

A few weeks ago Amazon launched UnSpun, a web application to collectively manage lists of all sorts.

During signup I was presented with the following.

Screenshot of UnSpun with a broken letter

I know Internet Explorer fixes a lot of broken encoding by guessing the true encoding for just about everything, maybe that’s why they never noticed during development?

I’ve had this problem myself on a few occasions. Because geographical information is commonly extracted from text files and loaded into a database you always have to be really careful to transcode any data extracted from text files to the same encoding as the database. In the case of ISO-8859-1/15, which is commonly used in west-european countries, there is a really simple oneliner to transcode to utf-8.

source.unpack('C*').pack('U*')

Comments

NoSpoon about 1 hour later: (delete)

You're coming from Neuchâtel in Switzerland? Me too... ¶
Manfred Stienstra about 1 hour later: (delete)

No, for some reason that was the city they presented first, wich is strange because they know my address from my Amazon profile. ¶
Diego Pires Plentz about 11 hours later: (delete | show email)

Ruby on Rails... ¶