I recently was setting up a new VPS on Linode and I got the following error when trying to create a new database:

ERROR: new encoding (UTF8) is incompatible with the encoding of the template database (SQL_ASCII) 
HINT: Use the same encoding as in the template database, or use template0 as template.

This error is related to the locale of the system when Postgres was installed. If you run the commands in my previous post before installing Postgres, you should avoid these errors altogether.

If Postgres has already been installed, however, you can run the following commands (assuming Postgres version 8.4) to reinitialise the database with the correct encoding:

pg_dropcluster --stop 8.4 main
pg_createcluster --start -e UTF-8 8.4 main

Note: this will erase all databases and reset your postgres configuration so it is only really useful when you are first setting up your database, or have taken appropriate measures to be able to restore your data.

Today Radar and I encountered a little issue with String encodings in Ruby 1.9. In this project, some Merb UTF-8 params needed to be unescaped. We spent some trying to force strings into UTF-8 encoding but for some reason while the encoding was UTF-8, the actual contents of the strings were getting massacred.

Long story short:

# In Ruby 1.9

# Broken
puts URI::unescape("Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg") # => "Baden-Württemberg"

# Working
puts CGI::unescape("Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg") # => "Baden-Württemberg"

Another lesson we learnt on our adventures today is the following:

# In Ruby 1.9

m1 = "Munich"
puts = m1.encoding  # let's suppose it is something other than UTF-8, such as ASCII-8Bit

m2 = "München"
puts = m2.encoding  # let's suppose we have a UTF-8 encoded string


# The following will raise an exception about mismatched encodings
m3 = m1 << m2

# The easiest way to get around this is to do the concatenation like so:
m3 = m3 = m1 << m2.force_encoding("UTF-8")