rake invalid byte sequence in UTF-8

Question

Out of the blue I am getting a weird error for any rake command on my webserver running rails 3.2 and Ruby 1.9.3p125 and the stack trace is the same no matter what rake task. There is nothing but what exists in ascii in Rakefile and lib/tasks.

The stack trace:

rake --trace
rake aborted!
invalid byte sequence in UTF-8
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:183:in `glob'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:183:in `block in have_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:181:in `each'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:181:in `have_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:468:in `find_rakefile_location'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:486:in `raw_load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:82:in `block in load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:133:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:81:in `load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:65:in `block in run'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:133:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:63:in `run'
/usr/local/bin/rake:32:in `<main>'

The offending method is

def have_rakefile
      @rakefiles.each do |fn|
        if File.exist?(fn)
          others = Dir.glob(fn, File::FNM_CASEFOLD)
          return others.size == 1 ? others.first : fn
        elsif fn == ''
          return fn
        end
      end
      return nil
    end

Since the stack trace was unhelpful to me I inserted a puts "#{fn} #{File::FNM_CASEFOLD}" at the beginning of the block and got this:

rakefile 8
Rakefile 8
rake aborted!
invalid byte sequence in UTF-8
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:184:in `glob'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:184:in `block in have_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:181:in `each'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:181:in `have_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:469:in `find_rakefile_location'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:487:in `raw_load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:82:in `block in load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:133:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:81:in `load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:65:in `block in run'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:133:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rake/application.rb:63:in `run'
/usr/local/bin/rake:32:in `<main>'

The rakefile is just the default one rails generates

# Add your own tasks in files placed in lib/tasks ending in .rake,
# for example lib/tasks/capistrano.rake, and they will automatically be available to Rake.

require File.expand_path('../config/application', __FILE__)
require 'rake/dsl_definition'
require 'rake'

MyApp::Application.load_tasks

The only task file in lib/tasks is

 desc "Resets the help files in the db by deleting all existing and rereading the yaml files"
    task :help_reset => :environment do
      HelpSystem.delete_all
      HelpSystem.seed_help
    end

I have no idea where to go next, any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Try saving the offending file (could be anything that rake is trying) in UTF-8 WITH BOM.