title: Rails rendering JSON response with UTF-8
body: <p>I'm trying to build an API with Rails and been doing quite good so far, however now that I added a record with an Umlaut I come to a Problem where I can't render the JSON anymore and I can't figure out how to solve my problem.
  Here is what the logs say:</p>
  
  <pre><code> Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 40ms
  
  JSON::GeneratorError (source sequence is illegal/malformed utf-8):
    app/controllers/api/v1/raids_controller.rb:8:in `index'
  
  
    Rendered /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/gems/actionpack-   
  4.1.8/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/_source.erb (1.4ms)
    Rendered /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/gems/actionpack-    
  4.1.8/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/_trace.html.erb (2.3ms)
   Rendered /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/gems/actionpack-
  4.1.8/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/_request_and_response.html.erb (1.9ms)
   Rendered /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/gems/actionpack-
  4.1.8/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/templates/rescues/diagnostics.erb within rescues/layout     
  (30.2ms)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And this is the method inside my controller that produces this output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def index
    #This is the default call and should list all tournaments.
    @tournaments = Tournament.all
    @tournaments = @tournaments.order("startdate DESC")
  
    respond_to do |format|
      format.json { render :json =&gt; @tournaments }
    end
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Would be awesome if someone could help me to solve my problem. I already checked and I'm sure that UTF-8 encoding is used everywhere. Also if I check through rails console I see that the Character Ü is encoded as <strong>name: "\xDC"</strong></p>