Skip to main content

Ruby on Rails, Unicode and Oracle

I was kind of in love with Ruby on Rails but now our relationship has hit the first bump: the infamous UTF-8 issue. In short, Ruby does not support UTF-8 (that's more or less the situation). So Rails does not either. However, my task at hand basically involves CRUD operations on a legacy (yet, UTF-8 enabled) Oracle db including German texts. Well, here's how to do that:

The first stop for Unicode in general is the wiki page on Unicode and Rails: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings

The problem with that page is that it covers the setup of Postgres and MySql-based applications, but not Oracle. In order to get that done I left my database.yml as before, but added a line to config/environment.rb:

ENV['NLS_LANG']='american_america.AL32UTF8'

This sets an environment variable (it also works if you set the variable for your Rails server process externally). I had to figure out the value of this variable by querying the database:

select * from nls_database_parameters;

For the line in environment.rb use the parameters as: (NLS_LANGUAGE)_(NLS_TERRITORY).(NLS_CHARACTERSET)

OK, I'm happy with my Rails again.

Comments

herr ernst said…
thanks so much, you saved my life!
10:56 AM
Hire Ruby on Rails Programmer said…
Worth reading and i like this "COFFEE & GEMS" :)
6:00 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan...
15 comments
Read more

CMS vendors now and then

CMS analyst Janus Boye has just published a post on CMS vendors that discontinue their products (because they get bought out or similar) During the past 10 years, a number of software products used by online professionals have been discontinued That sentence reminded me that I had given a talk almost 10 years ago (it was in 2001 exactly) that contained a slide on the CMS market at that time: The circles denote vendors that were part of CMS market overview articles by popular German IT magazines in that year (I wanted to show how differently the market place could be perceived). A vendor placed in any of the circles had enough attention to be part of at least one evaluation. The vendors outside of the circles were not part of any of these overview articles, but somehow present in the market place - at least I knew their names back then. It is interesting to look at the landscape from that time. Of course there are a number of well-known vendors that got bought (Vignette, Obtree, Gauss...
2 comments
Read more

Note on running Apache OpenWhisk actions locally for development

When you develop an action for Apache OpenWhisk it can become cumbersome and time-consuming to upload the action to your OpenWhisk instance in order to test it. This is especially the case when your (Node-based) action contains NPM dependencies. You can always use Node.js to run the action locally. However, ideally one wants to run in an environment as similar to the cloud as possible - in this case run within an OpenWhisk Docker image. This is where runtest.sh comes in handy: it does exactly this - run the action locally in an OpenWhisk container. I hope this tool will make it into wsk or a similar tool for local OpenWhisk action development.
Post a Comment
Read more