Question

I have run my program and everything works great. I am now trying to write some tests and I keep getting this error:

Encoding::CompatibilityError: incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8

I am not using any weird characters to my knowledge. I dont even know where to begin with this error. I tried adding these two lines to the environment.rb file:

Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8

and that did not help. Here is the test I am trying to run:

require 'test_helper'

class UserTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  test "should require all fields" do
    u = User.new
    assert_false u.valid?
  end
end

here is my users.yml file:

one:
  name: MyString
  password: MyString

two:
  name: MyString
  password: MyString

<% (1..5).each do |i| %>
  user_<%= i %>:
    name: user_<%= i %>
    password: user_<%= i %>
<% end %>

here is my stack trace:

Creating sqlite :memory: database
-- create_table("comment_votes", {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0021s
-- create_table("comments", {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0013s
-- add_index("comments", ["post_id"], {:name=>"index_comments_on_post_id"})
   -> 0.0005s
-- create_table("posts", {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0015s
-- create_table("users", {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0013s
-- create_table("votes", {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0010s
-- initialize_schema_migrations_table()
   -> 0.0009s
-- assume_migrated_upto_version(20111005200722, ["db/migrate"])
   -> 0.0013s

Encoding::CompatibilityError: incompatible character encodings: ASCII-8BIT and UTF-8

1 tests, 0 assertions, 0 failures, 1 errors, 0 pendings, 0 omissions, 0 notifications

Test suite finished: 0.058747 seconds

Process finished with exit code 1

Answer 1

Are your passwords salted? And does the salt, by any chance, use random bytes that may not conform to UTF-8 or US-ASCII? This has caught me out before. I had to force_encoding("BINARY") on my password salts.