At the lower end of the ASCII range are a few control characters that are generally innocent but useless. Often benign, they sometimes jump out and bite you when you’re trying to do something simple like generate some XML.

If you model doesn’t need them, then remove them before they even make it into your database.

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  strip_control_chars!
end

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  strip_control_chars!, :except => :title
end

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  strip_control_chars!, :only => :description
end

1. On rails 2.3

* gem install strip_control_chars
* add the following to your environment.rb

  config.gem 'strip_control_chars', version => "1.0"

1. On rails 3

* gem install strip_control_chars
* add the following to your Gemfile

  gem 'strip_control_chars', ">=2.0"

On rails 2.x you must use version 1.x of this gem. On rails 3.x you must use version 2.x of this gem.

The translation is done with raw bytes. If you happen to be using anything other than UTF-8 in your models, you’re likely to munge data.

This also means it’s almost certainly not ruby 1.9 compatible. Patches welcome.

This plugin is essentially a fork of the strip attributes plugin, released under the MIT License by Ryan McGeary.

github.com/rmm5t/strip_attributes

Copyright © 2007-2008 Ryan McGeary released under the MIT license Copyright © 2009 James Healy released under the MIT license

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License