I recently came across an issue in trying to use Permalink_fu plugin for rails. The problem happened while trying to create permalinks for existing records. Lets say you are trying to add permalink facility to a model “Designers”. You already have a few records in the database and would like to generate the permalink for them. This can be done as following:

Designers.find(:all).each(&:save)

This would give an error: Iconv::InvalidEncoding: invalid encoding (”ascii//translit//IGNORE”, “utf-8″)

Turns out code needs to be changed in permalink_fu.rb at line 90.
The order is not correct. Commented out portion is what comes with the plugin. The subsequent statement is the correction.

# PermalinkFu.translation_to = ‘ascii//translit//IGNORE’
PermalinkFu.translation_to = ‘ascii//ignore//translit’

Please refer to this tutorial on using permalink_fu.

Also use this Reference