Gsub: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

Ruby
1

I download the page http://www.ruby-forum.com/forum/4 using wget. Then i
cat the file and pipe to gsub.

I get: -e:1:in `gsub’: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII (ArgumentError)

wget -q -k -O index11.html http://www.ruby-forum.com/forum/4

cat index11.html | ruby -pe ‘gsub(/href=a/"/,"href="’${base}‘")’ >
ofile

(The value of base is http://www.ruby-forum.com/)

So what must i do so this command can run. It runs fine with another
site.
If i replace ruby with perl -pe ‘s|…|g’ that works fine.

I actually run this in a loop with various URLS from cron.

2

R… Kumar wrote:

If i replace ruby with perl -pe ‘s|…|g’ that works fine.

Replacing ruby 1.9.x with ruby 1.8.x is just as effective, and I would
recommend this for maintaining your sanity.

I can only guess that the external encoding picked up from your
platform’s environment is US-ASCII (are you using cygwin by any chance?)

You probably need to set the external encoding to UTF-8 or BINARY for
your regexp not to crash. Try adding -Ku or -Kn to your ruby command
line.

If you want to attempt to understand String encoding in ruby 1.9, then
good luck to you. I tried, documented what I found here:

and gave up after about 200 rules. There is no official documentation.

3

Brian C. wrote:

R… Kumar wrote:

If i replace ruby with perl -pe ‘s|…|g’ that works fine.

Replacing ruby 1.9.x with ruby 1.8.x is just as effective, and I would
recommend this for maintaining your sanity.

I can only guess that the external encoding picked up from your
platform’s environment is US-ASCII (are you using cygwin by any chance?)

You probably need to set the external encoding to UTF-8 or BINARY for
your regexp not to crash. Try adding -Ku or -Kn to your ruby command
line.

If you want to attempt to understand String encoding in ruby 1.9, then
good luck to you. I tried, documented what I found here:
string19/string19.rb at master · candlerb/string19 · GitHub
and gave up after about 200 rules. There is no official documentation.

  1. I have moved to 1.9 long back. Don’t want to move back.

  2. I am on OSX. I think I had probably (?) solved this issue on my
    previous laptop (PPC) – now I;ve migrated my user to a new machine
    (Snow Leopard). All my settings, should have moved. (I say this since I
    had commented out the perl line).

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LANG=C

  1. Thanks for the link, i will read it. But NO, i have already read up
    enough a few months back, and do not have the energy to do it again :-(.

Thanks for the tip on -Ku / -Kn

4

Brian C. wrote:

I can only guess that the external encoding picked up from your
platform’s environment is US-ASCII (are you using cygwin by any chance?)

You probably need to set the external encoding to UTF-8 or BINARY for
your regexp not to crash. Try adding -Ku or -Kn to your ruby command
line.

Ok, I’ve got it. The problem occured when the program was run by cron.
My user setting is UTF and it ran fine in terminal. So now in the
program itself I have set LC_CTYPE and LC_ALL to en_US.UTF-8. Hopefully,
it should work fine now.

Thanks.

5

On 6/15/10, R… Kumar [email protected] wrote:

(The value of base is http://www.ruby-forum.com/)

So what must i do so this command can run. It runs fine with another
site.
If i replace ruby with perl -pe ‘s|…|g’ that works fine.

I actually run this in a loop with various URLS from cron.

Handling this kind of thing right means tracking encodings right…
which means you’d have to extract the encoding from the http session
and then mark the input as that encoding in your ruby script… and
then deal with the inevitable incompatible encoding errors that would
crop up.

It sounds to me, tho, like in this case what you have a just some
hacky little scripts and it would be acceptable for them to be
imperfect. So, in that case, I suggest trying to set the encoding for
your source file(s) to BINARY. That’s a hack, but it ought to be
effective.

Alternately, you could drop back to the 1.8 interpreter, like Brian
suggests, which more or less uses BINARY as the default source
encoding.

6

Caleb C. wrote:

your source file(s) to BINARY. That’s a hack, but it ought to be
effective.

Additional info on the source, external, and internal encodings:

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_three_default_encodings

For the OP, I’d expect ruby -EBINARY ... or ruby -EASCII-8BIT ...
should work.

Regards,

Bill