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

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

Justificatory

pdf = WickedPdf.new.pdf_from_string( proforma.encode!('UTF-8') ) .....or proforma.encode!('UTF-8') Please encode it – Publican

ruby-forum.com/topic/208730 more about encoding like "\xfe" – Publican

@RajarshiDas: undefined method `force_encoding!' for #<String:0x007f9b95a16f70> - Any ideas? Edit: I'm using Ruby 2.0.0 – Justificatory

please see my comment it is updated – Publican

@RajarshiDas: That is one of the thing I have tried, getting the same error. It's as if a character was invalid but that doesn't make sense since it generates the PDF fine when just displaying it. Why is it giving me problems when saving to disk. – Justificatory

it is not able to generate the pdf how can it save it on your disk your proforma has some hex string and it not able to convert it into string...Please use magic_encoding rubygems.org/gems/magic_encoding gem or used # -*- encoding : utf-8 -*- in top of the file if it is not resolved – Publican

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 :)

Gerhart