ruby - Encoding::UndefinedConversionError

Question

I keep getting an Encoding::UndefinedConversionError - "xC2" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 every time I try to convert a hash into a JSON string. I tried with [.encode | .force_encoding](["UTF-8" | "ASCII-8BIT" ]), chaining .encode with .force_encoding, backwards, switching parameters but nothing seemed to work so I caught the error like this:

begin
  menu.to_json
rescue Encoding::UndefinedConversionError
  puts $!.error_char.dump
  p $!.error_char.encoding
end

Where menu is a sequel's dataset.to_hash with content from a MySQL DB, utf8_general_ci encoding and returned this:

"xC2"

<#Encoding:ASCII-8BIT>

The encoding never changes, no matter what .encode/.force_encoding I use. I've even tried to replace the string .gsub!(/\xC2/) without luck.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

menu.to_s.encode('UTF-8', invalid: :replace, undef: :replace, replace: '?')

This worked perfectly, I had to replace some extra characters but there are no more errors.