Question

My application needs to handle some international characters, namely ä, ü, ö and ß, which are still ascii.

When I tested the behavior of ruby when dealing with these chars, I got this error:

test.rb:1: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)
test.rb:1: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)

for this code:

puts "i like my chars: ä, ü, ö and ß!"

But the strange thing is: When using the Interactive Ruby Shell, I get no error!

EDIT: In my application, I’m retrieving the data from an external api. The above code is just an example!

Answer 1

Put the magic comment # coding: utf-8 at the beginning your your script (on the second line if you’re using shebang).

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
# coding: utf-8

puts "i like my chars: ä, ü, ö and ß!"