The author spent all the time documenting his journey but totally fails to explain the actual reason of the problem: If the file contains a UTF-8 byte sequence, why is there an attempt to parse it as US-ASCII? I get that it's just a wrong space, but if some day somebody actually want to put a UTF-8 char there for some reason, this commit essay wouldn't help at all whereas googling stackoverflow seems to deliver (unverified): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15947425/rake-tasks-fail...