Abdullah Barrak
August 26, 2016

Fixing Sinatra UTF-8 issue in Tilt rendered templates

In the past week, I’v been deploying a Sinatra app to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In development environment, everything was working just fine, but when I published the application and tested it in production, I encountered a weird problem in one of the templates that was supposed to be supporting uft-8 text without any issues.

Symptoms

The error was appearing in one of the .erb view files that contains a textarea field. When it is populated with a non English text at the server, the application crashes with 500 code. Here’s a fragment of the error stack trace:

2016-08-26 19:15:53 - Encoding::CompatibilityError - incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and US-ASCII:
        /var/app/current/views/review.erb:69:in `block in singleton class'
        /var/app/current/views/review.erb:-7:in `instance_eval'
        /var/app/current/views/review.erb:-7:in `singleton class'
        /var/app/current/views/review.erb:-9:in `__tilt_47353692136320'
        /opt/rubies/ruby-2.2.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.2.0/gems/tilt-2.0.5/lib/tilt/template.rb:167:in `call'
        /opt/rubies/ruby-2.2.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.2.0/gems/tilt-2.0.5/lib/tilt/template.rb:167:in `evaluate'
        /opt/rubies/ruby-2.2.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.2.0/gems/tilt-2.0.5/lib/tilt/template.rb:102:in `render'
        /opt/rubies/ruby-2.2.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.2.0/gems/sinatra-1.4.7/lib/sinatra/base.rb:823:in `render'
        /opt/rubies/ruby-2.2.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.2.0/gems/sinatra-1.4.7/lib/sinatra/base.rb:667:in `erb'
        /var/app/current/helpers.rb:24:in `block (2 levels) in serve_page'

Guided by the error message indication. I attempted to fix the issue by ensuring that all parts are encoded as UTF-8. I set accept-charset attribute for the form and texteara tag to "UTF-8", forced source files to be UTF-8 by inserting # 😁 comment, and checked the Sinatra routing is also set to have headers 'Content-type' => 'text/html; charset=utf-8', But unfortunately none of that was solving the problem.

By taking a closer look at the stack trace, I figured that it was happening specifically during the template rendering phase, and might have something to do with one of Sinatra’s dependencies, Tilt rendering library.

Solution

Indeed it was caused by Tilt . In fact, it’s a known issue and has been pointed out in the gem’s repository main page. Setting ruby’s external encoding plus the source files to UTF-8 solved it for me just like mentioned in the link.

If you’ve structured your application in the modular style, then set encoding early in the class.

class MyApplication < Sinatra::Application
  # set encoding.
  Encoding.default_external = "UTF-8"
end

In classic applications, this would suffice.

Encoding.default_external = "UTF-8"

That’s it. Hope It helps someone else !

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