Tim Brandin

An improvement to this would be to have the helper return {class: 'active'} like this:

// Determine if current link should be active.
Handlebars.registerHelper('active', function(path) {
  return curPath() == path ? {class: 'active'} : '';
});

And we can use it now like this now:
<li {{active '/'}}> <a href="/">home</a> </li>

That way, we don't get empty class attributes in the markup.

One also have to have UTF8 as default in the locale settings for the postgres user in unix.

export LANGUAGE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

This solved the puzzle for me.