I'm using cypress for test automation and when running a test spec from the Git for Windows bash terminal I get weird characters in the results output:
cypress spec run in Git for Windows bash -
If I run cypress from a Windows command prompt the output characters are correct:
cypress spec run in Windows Command Prompt -
I'm using Windows 7, cypress 5.1.0, and Git for Windows 2.28.0 with mintty 3.2.0
Any thoughts on how to correct this?
The issue is described in this GitHub issue.
The problem is that Cypress is sending UTF-8 encoded text through its stdout which is mangled by Windows before being received by Mintty (which is what hosts bash and runs git on Windows).
I understand that Mintty doesn't yet instruct Windows to not mangle the stdout it processes - (cmd.exe does, however, which is why it works there) - but we can do that ourselves by changing our Windows OEM Code Page setting using the chcp program (located at C:\Windows\System32\chcp.com and yes, that's a .com, not .exe). You can add a command to your .bashrc file so it will always run when you fire up Mintty:
Open mintty on Windows - presumably this starts a bash shell.
Go to your home directory (i.e. cd ~)
Open or create a .bashrc file.
Put this in the file (update the path to your chp.com program as appropriate):
/c/Windows/System32/chcp.com 65001
Then restart the terminal window and it should work.
As both @digijay and @Dai replied above the cause of the issue is described here https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/2806
The issue was resolved with the next release of git-for-windows. Prior to the fix being released, I solved the issue for myself by simply running this at the bash command line before running my cypress run command:
> cmd //c chcp 65001