Bug
On Windows, when agents produce output containing emoji or non-ASCII characters
(—, ✅, ⚠️, 🔍, 🟡, etc.), the characters are mangled when passed to downstream
agents or when posted via tools (e.g., gh api).
Example: ✅ becomes Γ£à, — becomes ΓÇö, 🟡 becomes ≡ƒƒí
Reproduction
- Create a workflow where agent A produces emoji in its output
- Agent B receives agent A's output and posts it via
gh pr comment
- The posted comment contains garbled characters
Environment
- Windows 11, PowerShell 7
- Conductor v0.1.1
- Provider: copilot
$env:PYTHONIOENCODING = "utf-8" is set but doesn't fix inter-agent output passing
Root Cause (suspected)
The agent output capture pipeline uses Python's default console encoding
(charmap/cp1252 on Windows) instead of UTF-8 when collecting agent responses
and passing them through the workflow context. The PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 env var
fixes Python's own stdout but doesn't affect how the Copilot SDK or subprocess
pipes handle encoding internally.
Expected Behavior
Agent outputs should preserve Unicode characters end-to-end on all platforms.
Bug
On Windows, when agents produce output containing emoji or non-ASCII characters⚠️ , 🔍, 🟡, etc.), the characters are mangled when passed to downstream
(—, ✅,
agents or when posted via tools (e.g., gh api).
Example:
✅becomesΓ£à,—becomesΓÇö,🟡becomes≡ƒƒíReproduction
gh pr commentEnvironment
$env:PYTHONIOENCODING = "utf-8"is set but doesn't fix inter-agent output passingRoot Cause (suspected)
The agent output capture pipeline uses Python's default console encoding
(
charmap/cp1252on Windows) instead of UTF-8 when collecting agent responsesand passing them through the workflow context. The
PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8env varfixes Python's own stdout but doesn't affect how the Copilot SDK or subprocess
pipes handle encoding internally.
Expected Behavior
Agent outputs should preserve Unicode characters end-to-end on all platforms.