Monthly Archives: February 2011

Rails forms automatically insert a hidden utf8 field? (a.k.a. what’s with the checkmark/snowman?)

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Yes, apparently this is true according to a response on StackOverflow. Let’s say you have a simple form from a model:

  <%= form_for @some_model do |f| %>
   ...
  <% end %>

You might see the following output in the generated HTML:

  <div style="margin:0;padding:0;display:inline">
  <input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="&#x2713;" />
  ...other stuff...
  </div>

Apparently in order to force browsers to submit the form in UTF-8 encoding mode this UTF-8 value (✓) does the trick. If you peer into the code you can see inside the actionpack form_tag_helper.rb that this is called the “snowman_tag”. A little Googling reveals this post on http://railssnowman.info:

What’s with the _utf8/_e/_snowman tag in Rails 3?

The _utf8 input tag forces Internet Explorer to properly respect your form’s character encoding.

Rails uses the accept-charset attribute in your form element to let the server know that it should be able to deal with unicode characters (think of a user searching for café).

But it looks like old snowman value &#9731; (☃) has been since replaced with the simple check mark &#x2713; (✓). :)

Making your bash prompt Git-aware (a.k.a. the superprompt)

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I recently started on a project where I’m doing some pair programming and someone yesterday brought up the Pivotal Git scripts that help modify your Git local.name via a single command: git-pair [person1] [person2]. Then it was the case that another person said that they learned a trick of modifying their shell prompt to show the current local.name so you’d be reminded who you were working with—so you wouldn’t accidentally give attribution to someone you’re not pairing with. This turns out to be really helpful if you’re a freelancer like me who hops around different projects.

Later a nice addition was to show the current branch you’ve checked out. This is critical for me because I never remember and I’ve more than once created a new branch and forgotten to check it out.

And … today I was talking to some more devs and the request came up: “it’d be nice to know if I have modified files in my repo.”

So, I present to you a bunch of commands to add to your .bash_profile that do all of this:

function current_uname {
    uname -a | cut -d' ' -f2 | sed -e 's/..*$//'
}

function current_git_user {
    git config --get user.name
}

function current_git_branch {
    git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* (.*)/; 1/'
}

function git_repo_has_modified_files {
    git status 2> /dev/null | sed -e 's/^#.*modified:.*$/*/' -e '/^#/d' -e '/^[^*]/d' | uniq
}

export PS1='$(current_uname) [$(current_git_user)$(current_git_branch)$(git_repo_has_modified_files)] A w > '
export PS2='  > '