Question

When executing a command like y Grau.all in rails console I am getting these strange !binary strings instead of the attribute’s name. Any idea how to fix this?

Thanks.

irb(main):003:0> y Grau.all
  ←[1m←[36mGrau Load (0.0ms)←[0m  ←[1mSELECT "graus".* FROM "gr
  ←[1m←[35mEXPLAIN (0.0ms)←[0m  EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN SELECT "grau

EXPLAIN for: SELECT "graus".* FROM "graus"
0|0|0|SCAN TABLE graus (~1000000 rows)

---
- !ruby/object:Grau
  attributes:
    !binary "aWQ=": 27
    !binary "bm9tZQ==": 1 Grau
    !binary "Y3JlYXRlZF9hdA==": 2012-04-06 21:24:34.553163000 Z
    !binary "dXBkYXRlZF9hdA==": 2012-04-06 21:24:34.553163000 Z
- !ruby/object:Grau
  attributes:
    !binary "aWQ=": 28
    !binary "bm9tZQ==": 2 Grau
    !binary "Y3JlYXRlZF9hdA==": 2012-04-06 21:24:34.599963000 Z
    !binary "dXBkYXRlZF9hdA==": 2012-04-06 21:24:34.599963000 Z

[UPDATES]

irb(main):001:0> Grau.find(1)
  ←[1m←[36mGrau Load (43.8ms)←[0m  ←[1mSELECT "graus".* FROM "graus" WHERE "grau
s"."id" = ? LIMIT 1←[0m  [["id", 1]]
=> #<Grau id: 1, nome: "1º Grau", created_at: "2012-04-11 15:51:32", updated_at:
 "2012-04-11 15:51:32">
irb(main):002:0>

I am using Rails 3.2.3, Ruby 1.9.3 on a Windows 7 64 bit.

Answer 1

It appears to be because rails defaults to using the newer psych YAML engine, the older syck yaml engine doesn’t output the !binary keys. If you’re just wanting it for testing in the console you can switch back to the older yaml engine as a temp workaround:

 > y User.first
  User Load (0.0ms)  SELECT "users".* FROM "users" LIMIT 1
--- !ruby/object:User
attributes:
  !binary "aWQ=": 1
  !binary "bmFtZQ==": Example User
  !binary "ZW1haWw=": [e-mail]

 > YAML::ENGINE.yamler= 'syck'
=> "syck"

 > y User.first
  User Load (1.0ms)  SELECT "users".* FROM "users" LIMIT 1
--- !ruby/object:User
attributes:
  id: 1
  name: Example User
  email: [e-mail]

You would only need to do this when your ActiveRecord column names/attributes keys are encoded using Encoding::ASCII_8BIT which I think only happens with SQLite.

---

Update:

Since posting this answer the SQLite3 gem has been fixed to return utf8 for column names. Make sure you’re using version 1.3.6 (or higher) of the sqlite3 gem. Then the default/newer psych yaml engine (which also supports human-readable unicode output) will work without problems:

 > y User.first
  User Load (0.0ms)  SELECT "users".* FROM "users" LIMIT 1
  EXPLAIN (0.0ms)  EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN SELECT "users".* FROM "users" LIMIT 1
EXPLAIN for: SELECT  "users".* FROM "users"  LIMIT 1
0|0|0|SCAN TABLE users (~1000000 rows)

--- !ruby/object:User
attributes:
  id: 1
  name: irmão
  email: [e-mail]