[check-setup] UnicodeEncodeErrors on terminals with non-Unicode locales about cli HOT 5 OPEN

The additional Unicode characters that cause a UnicodeEncodeError with check_setup.py and Python 3.6 are on lines 50-55 of check_setup.py:

status = {
        True:  success("✔ yes"),
        False: failure("✘ no"),
        None:  warning("⚑ warning"),
        ...:   unknown("? unknown"),
    }

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@terrycojones I believe this occurs when your terminal isn't using a Unicode locale, such as en_US.UTF-8 for example. Can you paste the output of running the locale command?

Some CLI frameworks like Click do a lot of contortions to automagically deal with terminal encoding issues, but this project doesn't use Click (yet…?) and currently assumes a Unicode locale.

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@tsibley Ah, yes, you're right, thanks. Setting LC_ALL to C.UTF-8 fixed it for me. I already had LANG=en_US.UTF-8 but that wasn't enough.

I guess for this issue, if anyone has the time/interest, printing a test (e.g., zero-width space) unicode char and catching UnicodeEncodeError would allow you to decide what to output. But maybe that's overkill. The exception could also be caught and you could print out a line telling the user what to do, depending on what shell they are using :-) Or, just close this issue......

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@terrycojones Glad it's fixed for you!

Testing for UnicodeEncodeError is a clever way of detecting support! I'd think you could also inspect the encoding of stdout, but that might lie. :-) In any case, I expect the best way to solve this is to adopt the Unicode terminal support and fallback handling from a robust library like Click instead of implementing it ourselves.

I'll leave this issue open as a reminder that this does exist as a legitimate issue and for anyone who might come across the same error and need a fix.

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Thanks for the pointer to Click, I'd not heard of it. Re leaving the issue open - up to you, of course. I would close it :-)

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