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Bug #5262

closed

invalid multibyte escapes should raise a clearer error

Added by coldnebo (Larry Kyrala) over 12 years ago. Updated over 12 years ago.

Status:
Closed
Assignee:
-
Target version:
-
ruby -v:
ruby 1.9.2p290 (2011-07-09 revision 32553) [x86_64-linux]
Backport:
[ruby-core:39222]

Description

Here's an irb example of the issue using 'curly-quotes':

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :001 > "“"
=> "“"
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :002 > "“".encoding
=> #Encoding:UTF-8
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :003 > "\“"
SyntaxError: (irb):3: invalid multibyte char (UTF-8)
(irb):3: invalid multibyte char (UTF-8)
from /local/rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/irb:16:in `'

I don't think anyone would ever do this on purpose. But it can happen accidentally when copying and pasting snippets from email/text clients.

Trying to spot this error can be very difficult because curly quotes are valid UTF-8 chars in this case.

I propose that the error be changed to:

SyntaxError: (irb):3: invalid escape sequence: '\“'.

This would have directed me to the root cause of the problem much sooner.

background on the original rails context here: https://gist.github.com/1184533

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