Question

I have a Ruby/Rails app.

I have an artists table in my postgresql database which I want to query by name. I have some artists with portuguese characters etc. and am having some issues querying them.

For example one band is called Legião Urbana. If I query with the string “legiã” from my app I get the following params:

{"action"=>"search_artist", "q"=>"legi\343", "controller"=>"home"}

However I get an error from the query

Artist.all(:conditions => "name LIKE '%#{params[:q]}%'")

PGError: ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xe32527

What should I be doing to convert into UTF8 or fix this from happening somehow?

Answer 1

I think this might do it

require 'iconv'
Iconv.conv("UTF8", "LATIN1", params[:q])