Soft signs in rails console - ruby-on-rails

Question

I want to create multiple categories via console and I want to be able add soft signs. At this moment I can't do that.
It's very important to project that I can save category names with soft signs.
Can somebody tip me where to search? I searched such tag - soft signs rails.
There wasn't any usefull resource.
Thanks
EDIT
Soft signs in my native language is like this.
Ā,Š,Ē,Ž with that symbol called soft sign abowe the character.
At this moment when I try to save new category record it shows me this kind off error
thodError: undefined methodcache_ancestry!' for #
But I am sure that I didn't change anything in models or controllers :(

Answer 1

What version of Ruby is this? What you're seeing there are either US-ASCII strings with UTF-8 data in them (Ruby 1.9) or byte arrays (Ruby 1.8).
If you're using Ruby 1.8, you may need to use Iconv to convert your encoding from US-ASCII to UTF-8. If you're using Ruby 1.9, then make sure you're creating UTF-8 strings and it should work just fine.
Note that those escape sequences are correct - that is the literal byte array of those characters, assuming the proper encoding is applied, so you may not need to actually change anything. If the bytes are right, everything's fine - you're just seeing ruby interpret the string as ASCII rather than UTF-8 or whatnot.
In Ruby 1.8, when you #inspect a string, you get the escaped version, but putsing it will show you the actual string:
1.8.7 :021 > s = "Komunālās mašīnas"
=> "Komun\304\201l\304\201s ma\305\241\304\253nas"
1.8.7 :022 > puts s
Komunālās mašīnas
In 1.9, you get the correct display all around, so long as your encoding is right:
1.9.3p327 :001 > s = "Komunālās mašīnas"
=> "Komunālās mašīnas"
1.9.3p327 :004 > s.force_encoding "US-ASCII"
=> "Komun\xC4\x81l\xC4\x81s ma\xC5\xA1\xC4\xABnas"
1.9.3p327 :005 > puts s
Komunālās mašīnas

Answer 2

Check this out Edgars:
#encoding: UTF-8
t = 'ŠšÐŽžÀÁÂÃÄAÆAÇÈÉÊËÌÎÑNÒOÓOÔOÕOÖOØOUÚUUÜUÝYÞBßSàaáaâäaaæaçcèéêëìîðñòóôõöùûýýþÿƒ'
fallback = {
'Š'=>'S', 'š'=>'s', 'Ð'=>'Dj','Ž'=>'Z', 'ž'=>'z', 'À'=>'A', 'Á'=>'A', 'Â'=>'A', 'Ã'=>'A', 'Ä'=>'A',
'Å'=>'A', 'Æ'=>'A', 'Ç'=>'C', 'È'=>'E', 'É'=>'E', 'Ê'=>'E', 'Ë'=>'E', 'Ì'=>'I', 'Í'=>'I', 'Î'=>'I',
'Ï'=>'I', 'Ñ'=>'N', 'Ò'=>'O', 'Ó'=>'O', 'Ô'=>'O', 'Õ'=>'O', 'Ö'=>'O', 'Ø'=>'O', 'Ù'=>'U', 'Ú'=>'U',
'Û'=>'U', 'Ü'=>'U', 'Ý'=>'Y', 'Þ'=>'B', 'ß'=>'Ss','à'=>'a', 'á'=>'a', 'â'=>'a', 'ã'=>'a', 'ä'=>'a',
'å'=>'a', 'æ'=>'a', 'ç'=>'c', 'è'=>'e', 'é'=>'e', 'ê'=>'e', 'ë'=>'e', 'ì'=>'i', 'í'=>'i', 'î'=>'i',
'ï'=>'i', 'ð'=>'o', 'ñ'=>'n', 'ò'=>'o', 'ó'=>'o', 'ô'=>'o', 'õ'=>'o', 'ö'=>'o', 'ø'=>'o', 'ù'=>'u',
'ú'=>'u', 'û'=>'u', 'ý'=>'y', 'ý'=>'y', 'þ'=>'b', 'ÿ'=>'y', 'ƒ'=>'f'
}
p t.encode('us-ascii', :fallback => fallback)
See Ruby 1.9.x replace sets of characters with specific cleaned up characters in a string
EDIT:
To get all the characters for your language you will need to add them as desired to the fallback hash. When I run "Komunālās mašīnas" as the variable 't' I get this:
t = "Komunālās mašīnas"
t.encode('us-ascii', :fallback => fallback)
Encoding::UndefinedConversionError: U+0101 from UTF-8 to US-ASCII
You can tell from this where the problem lies by googling U+0101 which shows
http://www.charbase.com/0101-unicode-latin-small-letter-a-with-macron
So now you know which letter is not working and you can add it to the fallback hash like so:
fallback = { OTHER DEFINITIONS , 'ā'=>'a'}
Here's a place to start:
http://www.ascii-codes.com/cp775.html