solr, sunspot, bad request, illegal character

I am introducing sunspot search into my project. I got a POC by just searching by the name field. When I introduced the description field and reindexed sold I get the following error.

** Invoke sunspot:reindex (first_time)
** Invoke environment (first_time)
** Execute environment
** Execute sunspot:reindex
Skipping progress bar: for progress reporting, add gem 'progress_bar' to your Gemfile
rake aborted!
RSolr::Error::Http: RSolr::Error::Http - 400 Bad Request
Error: {'responseHeader'=>{'status'=>400,'QTime'=>18},'error'=>{'msg'=>'Illegal character ((CTRL-CHAR, code 11))
 at [row,col {unknown-source}]: [42,1]','code'=>400}}

Request Data: "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?><add><doc><field name=\"id\">ItemsDesign 1322</field><field name=\"type\">ItemsDesign</field><field name=\"type\">ActiveRecord::Base</field><field name=\"class_name\">ItemsDesign</field><field name=\"name_text\">River City Clocks Musical Multi-Colored Quartz Cuckoo Clock</field><field name=\"description_text\">This colorful chalet style German quartz cuckoo clock accurately keeps time and plays 12 different melodies. Many colorful flowers are painted on the clock case and figures of a Saint Bernard and Alpine horn player are on each side of the clock dial. Two decorative pine cone weights are suspended beneath the clock case by two chains. The heart shaped pendulum continously swings back and forth.&#13;On every

I assuming that the bad char is that you can see at the bottom. that is littered in a lot of the descriptions. I'm not even sure what char that is.

What can I do to get solr to ignore it or clean the data so that sold can handle it.

Thanks

Solution

Put the following in an initializer to automatically clean sunspot calls of any UTF8 control characters:

# config/initializers/sunspot.rb
module Sunspot
  # 
  # DataExtractors present an internal API for the indexer to use to extract
  # field values from models for indexing. They must implement the #value_for
  # method, which takes an object and returns the value extracted from it.
  #
  module DataExtractor #:nodoc: all
    # 
    # AttributeExtractors extract data by simply calling a method on the block.
    #
    class AttributeExtractor
      def initialize(attribute_name)
        @attribute_name = attribute_name
      end

      def value_for(object)
        Filter.new( object.send(@attribute_name) ).value
      end
    end

    # 
    # BlockExtractors extract data by evaluating a block in the context of the
    # object instance, or if the block takes an argument, by passing the object
    # as the argument to the block. Either way, the return value of the block is
    # the value returned by the extractor.
    #
    class BlockExtractor
      def initialize(&block)
        @block = block
      end

      def value_for(object)
        Filter.new( Util.instance_eval_or_call(object, &@block) ).value
      end
    end

    # 
    # Constant data extractors simply return the same value for every object.
    #
    class Constant
      def initialize(value)
        @value = value
      end

      def value_for(object)
        Filter.new(@value).value
      end
    end

    # 
    # A Filter to allow easy value cleaning
    #
    class Filter
      def initialize(value)
        @value = value
      end
      def value
        strip_control_characters @value
      end
      def strip_control_characters(value)
        return value unless value.is_a? String

        value.chars.inject("") do |str, char|
          unless char.ascii_only? and (char.ord < 32 or char.ord == 127)
            str << char
          end
          str
        end

      end
    end

  end
end

Source (Sunspot Github Issues): Sunspot Solr Reindexing failing due to illegal characters