Radio 21 Gram

When creating a new web application, it’s a good practice to use Unicode encoding in your database even when your content are all in English. Radio21g.com is created with UTF-8 from day 1 with following 2 steps:

1. To make sure your database is using Unicode to store the text data, make sure you create the database with encoding specified:

   create database radio21g character set utf8;

2. After the database ready, you also need to tell the rails Mysql adapter to save and retrieve the data as unicode. You do this in the last line of the /config/database.yml:

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: database
  username: root
  password:
  host: localhost
  encoding: utf8

In addition to database related settings, your web page (RHTML) should also display the text and submit the user input in UTF-8. To achieve that, you need to:

1. Specified the “charset=UTF-8″ in your HTML head:

   <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

2. Set the Content-Type header in the rails @headers object of each request. Usually this is done in the /app/controller/applicaiton.rb with a filter:

       class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base end
           before_filter :set_charset
   
           def set_charset
               @headers["Content-Type"] = "text/html; charset=utf-8"
           end
   
       end

   For Rails 2.0 and above, this step is not needed anymore as UTF-8 is the default setting in the @headers.