title: Character Encoding Error When Running rake assets:precompile
body: <p>I have a rails app that is getting a weird error when I try to run <code>rake assets:precompile</code>. It looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>rake aborted!
  Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2"
    (in /Users/lee/Code/draper/app/assets/stylesheets/application.css.scss)
  (sass):9
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm not sure where an invalid character might have slipped into my code. I'm using Twitter Bootstrap (boostrap-sass gem) and my <code>bootstrap_and_overrides.css.scss</code> file seems to be the culprit. I've already tried recreating this file from scratch in text mate to get any weird characters out and that didn't work. The only thing that seems to work is adding this to the top of my <code>bootstrap_and_overrides.css.scss</code>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@charset "UTF-8";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That allows me to run rake assets:precompile and then deploy to Heroku, but that seems like a hack and a dirty fix. I can deploy other apps to Heroku that use bootstrap-sass just fine and Heroku is able to run rake assets:precompile when deploying. Right now the only way to get around it is to include the <code>@charset "UTF-8";</code> and then run <code>rake assets:precompile</code> locally before deploying to Heroku so that it skips that step during deployment.</p>
  
  <p>I can't figure out where I went wrong with this. </p>