Ruby `split': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError)

Question

I am trying to populate the movie object, but when parsing through the u.item file I get this error:

`split\': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8

Answer 1

I had to force the encoding of each line to iso-8859-1 (which is the European character set)... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1

a=[]
IO.foreach("u.item") {|x| a << x}
m=[]
a.each_with_index {|line,i| x=line.force_encoding("iso-8859-1").split("|"); m[i]=x}