PG::CharacterNotInRepertoire exception

[sunny]

Hello!

I am suddenly receiving a lot of PG::CharacterNotInRepertoire exceptions coming from chinese IPs. I don't know if this is an attempt at an attack or regular visitors. I can't seem to see in the environment variables at the time of the exception where these characters are coming from but I am guessing that this comes from either inserting the request_hash or the referer as impressions.

The full exception message:

PG::CharacterNotInRepertoire: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xe8 0x6c 0x65`: INSERT INTO "impressions" ("impressionable_type", "impressionable_id", "controller_name", "action_name", "request_hash", "ip_address", "session_hash", "referrer", "params", "created_at", "updated_at") VALUES ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, $10, $11) RETURNING "id"

Using:

• impressionist v1.6.1
• rails v5.1.0
• pg v0.18.1

So that impressionist does not stop the website from being browsed I fixed this temporarily by adding to my ApplicationController:

def impressionist(_record)
  super
rescue PG::CharacterNotInRepertoire
end

Any hints on how to fix this properly?

[grfx1985]

it raises ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid and the MESSAGE has the pg content

rescue => e 
  if e.message.include?("PG::CharacterNotInRepertoire") 
    do some stuff !! 
  else
    do something else / ignore 
  end 
end