Printing emojis shows as garbage in console

[DeflateAwning]

What are the steps to reproduce this issue?

1. Click run on a program like: print("❌ Failure")
2. See that the printed message appears like: ��� Failure

What were you expecting to happen?

It should have printed this emoji: https://emojipedia.org/cross-mark

Which version of MicroPico are you using?

4.2.1

Support info

VS Code on Linux

[Josverl]

This appears to related to the configuration of the terminal with regards to UTF-8 in order to support Unicode.

The glyph is : Codepoints U+274C
Or Hexadecimal: E2 9D 8C

Im not sure if this should be solved

• in this extension's terminal configuration,
• or in the pico-mpy-com helper package

I tried to get a dev environment up to debug this but got caught on my inability to install that package. As my typescript skills are quite limited I decided to not pursue that further (and possibly loose hours to figure out to do a simple install).

[harvey2953]

if print("中文"), I have the same issue

[DeflateAwning]

Seems like it should probably be solved in this extension's terminal configuration.

[Josverl]

There seems/is to be very little configuration for the (External)Terminal in vscode, all terminals support Unicode without config.
So I expect it is the terminal Add in that needs attention.

[DeflateAwning]

Yeah VS Code's terminal definitely supports unicode by default. Am very curious what this extension did to cause an issue with that

[paulober]

Thanks for reporting and all the ideas. But i'm very sure as Josverl suggested the issue lies in pico-mpy-com. For datatransfer it uses the string representation of a Python bytes object. And since i'm in Typescript I can't use the python option to get it back into bytes for (and I think there was also a problem with running python in a subproc). The problem are the intentional and unintentional escape sequences and special unicode stuff I did parse manually: https://github.com/paulober/pico-mpy-com/blob/5f91b18f41dae644c8c3686be9b38f112f5a5afc/src/escapeCoder.ts
If I find some time I may look into it again and see if I find a better solution.

[DeflateAwning]

Feels like extremely bad practice (and outright unnecessary) to parse characters like that. There are encode and decode functions in every language for that purpose.

I haven't looked too deeply into exactly what's going on there, but seeing that type of code written out feels like a Problem X-Y, where the real issue is a step away from the function written there.

Potential fix:

function decodePythonStyleEscapes(str: string): string {
  return JSON.parse(`"${str.replace(/"/g, '\\"')}"`);
}

// Then in your writeEncodedBufferToFile, just do:
const processed = decodePythonStyleEscapes(escaped);
const binaryData = Buffer.from(processed, "utf-8");
await fileHandle.write(binaryData);