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="✓" /> ...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 ☃
(☃) has been since replaced with the simple check mark ✓
(✓). 🙂