Failed to execute: Error: "\xFE" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 - ruby-on-rails

Question

Rails 4
*Mac OSX 10.8.4*
I'm using the following Gem for wicked_pdf pdf generation:
gem 'wkhtmltopdf-binary'
gem 'wicked_pdf'
Rendering Views as pdfs works fine and Google displays it's PDF viewer correctly. My PDFs look exactly how I want them to.
The problem arises when I try to save a pdf to disc, for the purpose of emailing them to a user.
For example, this works fine:
def command
#event = Event.find(params[:id])
#client = Contact.find(#event.client_id)
#organizer = Contact.find(#event.organizer_id)
render layout: 'command',
pdf: 'Event Command',
show_as_html: params[:debug].present?,
dpi: 300,
print_media_type: true,
margin: {
top: 0,
bottom: 0,
left: 0,
right: 0
}
end
That will render the pdf in the Google Chrome PDF viewer.
But here, is where I want to generate a PDF and save to file.
def send_email
#event = Event.find(params[:id])
#client = Contact.find(#event.client_id)
#organizer = Contact.find(#event.organizer_id)
proforma = render_to_string(
pdf: 'proforma.pdf',
template: 'events/proforma',
layout: 'proforma'
)
pdf = WickedPdf.new.pdf_from_string(
proforma
)
save_path = Rails.root.join('public','proforma.pdf')
File.open(save_path, 'wb') do |file|
file << pdf
end
end
But I'm getting the error:
Failed to execute:
Error: "\xFE" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

Answer 1

Try this:
File.open(save_path, 'w:ASCII-8BIT') do |file|
file << pdf
end
The PDF rendered as a string in memory seems to be in ASCII, so save it as such :)