Dec 19 2012

Normally, I’m a bit of a grinch. I’ll admit it, I really hate Christmas. It reminds me of all of the worst parts of America: You know, how the baby Jesus commands us to literally shop until we kill each other…

Anyway, today, I was teaching a bunch of brand new Rails devs, and I had to explain the mysterious hidden input that form_for generates:

<input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="✔">

That, combined with the impending release of Rails 4, made me think about the charming little Snowman that Rails originally had: ☃.

So?

And what happened, then? Well, in Whoville they say - that @steveklabnik’s small heart grew three sizes that day. So he decided to make you a present:

gem install bring_back_snowman

Just do it, and your forms will submit _snowman=☃ to ensure that your data is encoded in UTF-8.

It is configurable, if you prefer something else. Add this to your application.rb:

config.snowman = {:emoji => "😢"}

You may also need to add the ‘magic comment’ at the top of the file:

# encoding: UTF-8

Please remember that if you don’t use something that’s UTF-8, this won’t actually work to fix the bug.

You can find the source of bring_back_snowman on GitHub, of course.

Merry Christmas!