International chars using RSpec with Ruby on Rails

Question

I have just started using RSpec and I copied the very simple test on the RSpec github repo just to make sure things are working as expected:

require \'spec_helpe         


        

Answer 1

Most likely you're missing a magic comment at the top of your file:

# encoding: UTF-8

Without this directive Ruby tries to interpret your file with the default US-ASCII encoding and fails since this character set does not include symbols like á or ç.

Here's a blog post on default source encoding in Ruby by James Edward Gray II.