JSON encoding wrongly escaped (Rails 3, Ruby 1.9.2)

In my controller, the following works (prints "oké")

puts obj.inspect

But this doesn't (renders "ok\u00e9")

render :json => obj

Apparently the to_json method escapes unicode characters. Is there an option to prevent this?

To set the \uXXXX codes back to utf-8:

json_string.gsub!(/\\u([0-9a-z]{4})/) {|s| [$1.to_i(16)].pack("U")}

You can prevent it by monkey patching the method mentioned by muu is too short. Put the following into config/initializers/patches.rb (or similar file used for patching stuff) and restart your rails process for the change to take affect.

module ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding
  class << self
    def escape(string)
      if string.respond_to?(:force_encoding)
        string = string.encode(::Encoding::UTF_8, :undef => :replace).force_encoding(::Encoding::BINARY)
      end
      json = string.gsub(escape_regex) { |s| ESCAPED_CHARS[s] }
      json = %("#{json}")
      json.force_encoding(::Encoding::UTF_8) if json.respond_to?(:force_encoding)
      json
    end
  end
end

Be adviced that there's no guarantee that the patch will work with future versions of ActiveSupport. The version used when writing this post is 3.1.3.

JSON encoding wrongly escaped (Rails 3, Ruby 1.9.2)

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