Funny things and common gotchas to know and avoid - Get on Rails with Globalize! Part 7 of 8

posted: June 7th, 2007 · by: Sven

in: Globalization, Programming · tagged as: , , , , , , , ·  12 comments »

This article is part of the series “Get on Rails with Globalize!” and like the two last installments it’s a catch-all list: this time we’re going to point out some unexpected behaviours, problems and other funny things. Nothing world-shattering, just some things that you’ll probably want to be informed about so you don’t run into any problems.

  • I’m seeing lot’s of strange characters!
  • Weird Currency parsing results
  • Globalize WrongLanguageError on attribute read
  • Globalizes screws my RJS (or: my IE6)!

I’ll edit and complete this list as needed. If you’ve found any other common gotchas concerning Globalize, please drop me a note!

I’m seeing lot’s of strange characters!

… also known as: what’s with all these quotation marks?

While it’d probably be tempting to quote the classics “The sixties weren’t good to you, were they?” (Sarge, Cars) the real I18n superhero knows that you actually have a problem with your character encoding here. What you need to do is get your entire application stack (Ruby, Rails, your database, webserver …) talk utf-8.

Here are some resources that you might find useful:

Weird Currency parsing results

Beware that the Globalize Currency class is still somewhat biased when it comes to parsing numbers in that it will always use a dot “.” as a decimal separator regardless of what’s defined as the current Locale.

Also, there’s a bug that causes Globalize to parse a String like “1.9” to a Cents value of 109 Cents instead of 190 Cents like one would expect. So beware the results.

Both of these problems are fixed by this patch though (to the best of my knowledge this was first posted on the Rails I18n mailinglist ):


Locale.set('en-US')
p Globalize::Currency.parse('1.90') # => #<Globalize::Currency:0x3768078 @cents=190>
Locale.set('de-DE')
p Globalize::Currency.parse('1,90') # => #<Globalize::Currency:0x3767f10 @cents=190>

Globalize WrongLanguageError on attribute read

When you encounter this error you’re probably doing something like this:


p = Page.find(1) # returns an english page
Globalize::Locale.set 'fr-CH' # p is now the 'wrong' language
puts p.title # This throws WrongLanguageError.

This really should be:


Globalize::Locale.set 'fr-CH'
p = Page.find(1) # or: p.reload (if p is already there)
puts p.title

Alternatively, if you have Globalize extensions installed, you can use the switch_language method:


@page.switch_language(base_language.code) { @page.title }

Globalizes screws my RJS (or: my IE6)!

Not really.

But probably you’ve followed the instructions from Chad Fowlers book “Rails Receipes” (page 268) and adopted the following piece of code:


after_filter :set_charset
  def set_charset
    unless @headers["Content-Type"] =~ /charset/i
      @headers["Content-Type"] ||= ""
      @headers["Content-Type"] += "; charset=utf-8"
    end
  end
end

With this you’ll most probably end up delivering broken HTTP headers like this:

Content-Type: ;charset=utf-8

It has been reported that this successfully screws RJS and apparently leaves IE 6.0 choking, too.

You can easily get around this by changing the fourth line to:

@headers["Content-Type"] ||= "text/html"

Another, probably slightly better variant of the set_charset filter can be found here: Some common questions on getting started - Get on Rails with Globalize! Part 2 of 6

Others?

Of course this list can’t ever be complete. So, again: if you’ve found any other common gotchas concerning Globalize, please drop me a note!

Leave a comment

12 Comments

  1. Solomon White said March 8th, 2008 at 11:59 PM  

    If you have an existing model named Country, the default Globalize setup will clobber it, and every time you try to access your model, you will end up accessing Globalize::Country instead. As documented here , this is because of the default instructions to add include Globalize to your environment.rb.

    Two solutions are available – module-ize your model, or else leave off the include Globalize, and explicitly call Globalize::Locale (et al) throughout your application.

  2. Sven said March 12th, 2008 at 02:02 AM  

    Hey Solomon!

    Thanks for that headsup. That’s a useful tip! I’ve never ran into that, but for sure that’s something quite some people will need a solution for.

  3. Maciej Bi?as said May 12th, 2008 at 11:24 PM  

    Solomon, I guess you could also do something like that

    class Locale include Globalize::Locale end

    and now you wouldn’t have to type in Globalize:: all the time for accessing the Locale class.

    (someone, please correct me if I’m wrong)

  4. Onno Schuit said June 20th, 2008 at 04:53 PM  

    Hi,

    Excellent walkthrough!

    About the “Weird Currency parsing results”: the patch seems broken. Here’s the entire patched parse method:

    def self.parse(num)
  case
  when num.is_a?(String)
    raise ArgumentError, "Not an amount (#{num})" if num.delete("^0-9").empty?
    _sep=(Locale.active.currency_decimal_sep || Locale.active.decimal_sep) if Locale.active?
    _sep||='.'
    _dollars, _cents = num.delete("^0-9"+_sep).split(_sep, 2)
    if !_cents
      _cents = 0 
    elsif _cents.length==1 #FIX: 1.9 is 1.90 not 1.09!
      _cents=_cents+'0'
    end                                         
    Currency.new(_dollars.to_i * 100 + _cents.to_i)
  when num.is_a?(Numeric)
    Currency.new(num * 100)
  when num.is_a?(NilClass)
    Currency.na
  else
    raise ArgumentError, "Unrecognized object #{num.class.name} for Currency"
  end                 
end

    Onno

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