Unicde Character in Rails View causing gem rack-google-analytics to fail - unicode

Question

I was recently attempting to do an update to my views and replace the vanilla asterisk "*" character which was meant to represent a star with the unicode black star "★" (U+2605, "&#x2605"; "&#9733"; 0xE2 0x98 0x85 (e29885)). Everything seemed to work great as I added the character into a string in the appropriate views. One of such views is shown below.
_recent_updates.html.haml
%table.tablesorter#home
%thead
%tr#header
%th#year Year
%th#name Player Name
%th#position Position
%th#school School
%th#stars Stars
%tbody
- #recent_commits.each do |rc|
%tr{:class => cycle("odd", "even")}
%td#class= rc.player.year
%td#name= link_to display_name(rc.player), player_path(rc.player.slug)
%td#position= Position.find(rc.player.position_id).abbr if rc.player.position_id
%td#school= link_to rc.school.name, school_path(rc.school.slug)
%td#stars= "#{display_star(rc.player.vc_star_rating)}★"
I released the update and went along with my business. A couple of days later, I checked Google Analytics to see how traffic was going to the site, and I noticed a precipitous drop to nearly zero. I did some checking as I knew there was a great deal of traffic to the site during this time period, and realized that there was something wrong with my google analytics code. When I looked at the source code for the page in production, here is what I saw.
<--! ...My Page Contents -->
<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof gaJsHost == 'undefined') {
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</scr
It appears that the extra bytes consumed by the unicode character were unaccounted for so that they effectively ate the bottom of my page, causing it to end abruptly. What I should have seen was that script tag should have been ended, as well as the end of the body and html tags like so.
<--! ... My Page Contents -->
<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof gaJsHost == 'undefined') {
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
</body>
</html>
I reverted to the previous change from git (the replacement of asterisks with stars was the only change in the commit in question), and my Google Analytics Tracking Code works fine again, and my script, body and html tags all have their proper closing tags.
My question is two fold.
How do I add the star character back into my view without eating up the end of my code?
I thought UTF-8 was supported out of the box in Rails 3.1, so why is this happening?

Answer 1

I have not seen this issue with Google Analytics in particular, but in general you will get errors if your Rails source files contain Unicode characters without having the
# encoding: UTF-8
line at the top. Double-check that your HAML file is actually encoded as UTF-8 and not anything weird like UTF-16 or a non-Unicode format, then add this tag to the top and see if that solves the issue. You may also try setting Haml::Template.options[:encoding] = "utf-8" in your environment.rb - afaik it should be the default, but may be overridden somewhere.
Rails 3.1 supports Unicode out of the box, but doesn't tolerate Unicode inside its code unless you ask it to. Also note that some database drivers still don't fully support Unicode.

Answer 2

After banging my head against the wall for a few days, and adding some variation of "encoding: UTF-8" to just about every file in my Rails app, I decided to try using the html code &#x2605. First I went to the trusty HTML2HAML converter. It told be that the html code &#x2605 converted to \★ in haml. So I tried that and got a nasty little ISE message. I tried a couple of other variations until finally I stumbled upon a solution.
I created an erb based partial _star.html.erb which I called from my _recent_updates.html.haml file specifically to render the star. Once I did that, everything cleared up and worked like a charm.
I'm still not sure what was going on with the haml, but I'm hoping someone smarter than me can figure it out.
Last line updated:
_recent_updates.html.haml
%table.tablesorter#home
%thead
%tr#header
%th#year Year
%th#name Player Name
%th#position Position
%th#school School
%th#stars Stars
%tbody
- #recent_commits.each do |rc|
%tr{:class => cycle("odd", "even")}
%td#class= rc.player.year
%td#name= link_to display_name(rc.player), player_path(rc.player.slug)
%td#position= Position.find(rc.player.position_id).abbr if rc.player.position_id
%td#school= link_to rc.school.name, school_path(rc.school.slug)
%td#stars
= render 'star', :rc => rc
My new partial
_star.html.erb
<%= "#{display_star(rc.player.vc_star_rating)}" %>★