In the past week, I have 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:

Recently, I’ve read Oslen Russ’s “Eloquent Ruby” and it was delightful read overall.

The book has a considerable reputation among the community. It is divided into (4) units about Ruby foundations, and the software process practices.