Ruby on Rails - unable to convert "\x89" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 for xxx/xxxx/xxxx

Question

I am installing ruby on rails 4.0.0 on my linux system , but i am getting this kind of errors unable to convert "\x89" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF8 for guides/assets/images/getting_started/routing_error_no_route_matches.png, skipping and many similar errors , i read here that it won't cause any effect ,but i do not understand why it is coming . Any pointers?

Solution 1

You need to update / install a version of the rdoc gem that supports the conversion. Then these errors won't appear during generation of the documentation when you install rails or when you regenerate the documentation.

gem install rdoc

Then to regenerate the documentation

gem rdoc --all --overwrite

Solution 2

Set such environment variables before you do install:

export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Solution 3

If you prefer using online documentation to using rdoc and ri, then you can avoid these errors and speed up your installs by skipping the rdoc and ri installations. Michael Hartl recommends this in his book. Just add a .gemrc file to your home directory with the following contents:

install: --no-rdoc --no-ri
update: --no-rdoc --no-ri

Comments

[garbagecollector]

As a general practice, it's a good idea to gem update --system and gem update before installing additional gems.

[voices]

sudo gem update --system && sudo gem update && sudo gem install rdoc && sudo gem rdoc --all --overwrite; worked well for me; whereas setting/exporting/changing environment variables did not.