incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT

16 Aug 2012

Just got the following error in my Rails project (Rails 3.2.6, Ruby 1.9.3):

ActionView::Template::Error (incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT)

That was caused by the case when MySQL record (ActiveReciord object, actually) contained UTF-8 characters and i was trying to output those chars in my template. But mysql gem does not support those. It needs some hacking.

Luckily, there is more convenient way to solve the problem. The solution of this issue now appears too easy:

Install the mysql2 gem
Use adapter: mysql2 instead of adapter: mysql in your config/database.yml file