i have in database a string like \303\255 which represents í .
How can i convert that 8 chars representation in í ?
I could replace them all, but isn't there any other way ?
2 Answers
It's not really 8 characters in the string, it's 2 bytes. I'm not sure where you want \303\255 to show up as í but if you put
# encoding: utf-8
in the top of your .rb-file Ruby will use UTF-8.
If you are using Ruby on Rails you can try to add the following two lines to config/environment.rb
Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8
Comments
Assuming the problem really is as you describe, and not just a misunderstanding.
I battled with this. It's not pretty. This parses the string and uses pack to pack down the relevant bytes.
"foo \\303\\255 bar".gsub(/(\\\d{3})+/) do |match|
match[1..-1].split("\\").map{ |octet| octet.to_i(8) }.pack("c*")
end.force_encoding("UTF-8")
The much shorter version uses eval, but it's always worth trying to avoid eval if you can, since it has huge security risks if used incorrectly. Given that we're validating the format of what we're eval'ing here, I'll go ahead and say it's probably safe to do this:
"foo \\303\\255 bar".gsub(/(\\\d{3})+/) { |m| eval('"' + m + '"') }
3 Comments
kaydara
The eval is working! Will check why the first os not working... Thanks a lot man! :D
d11wtq
Make sure you only eval the bits of the string you know are safe, otherwise (if you could find yourself in a mess). My code is ok, but
eval'ing the entire string, while it would likely work, would be dangerous.kaydara
This is internal and private data transformation so it's ok to use eval on this, but thanks for the warning!
str = "\"\\303\\255\""(i.e. the slashes really are in the string?). You'll have to extract them andArray#packthem into real characters if they are.