utf8 ruby1.9

[quote]invalid byte sequence in utf-8 mysql [/quote]

In Ruby 1.9.3 is possible to use String.encode to "ignore" the invalid UTF-8 sequences. Here is a snippet that will work both in 1.8 (iconv) and 1.9 (String#encode) :

require 'iconv' unless String.method_defined?(:encode)
if String.method_defined?(:encode)
  file_contents.encode!('UTF-8', 'UTF-8', :invalid => :replace)
else
  ic = Iconv.new('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE')
  file_contents = ic.iconv(file_contents)
end

or if you have really troublesome input you can do a double conversion from UTF-8 to UTF-16 and back to UTF-8:

require 'iconv' unless String.method_defined?(:encode)
if String.method_defined?(:encode)
  file_contents.encode!('UTF-16', 'UTF-8', :invalid => :replace, :replace => '')
  file_contents.encode!('UTF-8', 'UTF-16')
else
  ic = Iconv.new('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE')
  file_contents = ic.iconv(file_contents)
end