I don’t like writing short posts about fixing code errors but I think this one deserves a quick shout out. If you get an error in your Rails application that says “interning empty string”, there could be something wrong with an error message in your validations. For example, I had something like:
def geocoding_works_when_geotarget_is_true if geotarget and (self.lat == nil or self.lng == nil or self.address_changed?) errors.add("Provide better location information so that we can geotarget your reminders.") unless geocode end end
The ‘.’ in my error message caused an “interning empty string” error. I hope I save someone an hour by posting this.
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11 Comments
Excellent post. saved me hours of digging into the problem. Did you find out why this problem occurs?
Haven’t looked into it much further. Drop a comment if you find out.
Thank you for this post. You saved me a ton of debugging time. That is a strange Rails bug.
Thank you so much for this. I murdered an hour on this before resorting to Google. Found your page right away, and in my case it was “…” in the error message causing the problem.
I’m glad this is saving people time. It’s sort of a lame post but serves the intended purpose.
This is one of the most random bugs I’ve encountered.
Thank you for the time that you just saved me, I’ve already wasted enough.
I wish I had Googled this sooner.
thanks, just saved me some headaches with an old codebase!
Thank you. Your post helped me solve this silly error. Wish I had googled the solution a lot sooner
Obviously, this is different from your case, but I traced the same error to a piece of code that used the .to_sym method. And I reproduced it in the console:
ruby-1.8.7-p174 :084 > a = ‘fred’
=> “fred”
ruby-1.8.7-p174 :085 > a.to_sym
=> :fred
ruby-1.8.7-p174 :086 > a = ”
=> “”
ruby-1.8.7-p174 :087 > a.to_sym
ArgumentError: interning empty string
from (irb):87:in `to_sym’
from (irb):87
It was fine in Rails 2.2. Broke as I upgraded to Rails3.
Oh wow, thanks a lot. I had a “.” in my i18n translation file that was used for the validation error.
Saved me a lot of time and nerves.
You should also check your view file, I had one with the filename “title..html.erb”