Hi,

The dictionary

OSPlatform current environment

contains a copy of the OS's environment variables (more correctly of the VM process), as key/value pairs.

These are obtained via the following system calls:

on macOS & *nix

  LIBC environ

on Windows

  KERNEL32 GetEnvironmentStrings

It is however a bit unclear how these are encoded. On macOS & *nix that seems to be UTF8, on Windows there are some reports that it appears to be Latin1 - but both might be locale specific, I don't know either way.

Does anyone know for sure ?

I furthermore think that OSEnvironment and its subclasses, who do this call, should be responsible for decoding the C strings into proper Pharo strings, and not leave that responsibility to its users.

Fundamentally, in the following, the decoding is still not done correctly and that is wrong/confusing IMHO.

$ FOO=beno��t ./pharo Pharo.image eval 'OSEnvironment current associations'

{'TERM_PROGRAM'->'Apple_Terminal'. 'TERM'->'xterm-256color'. 'SHELL'->'/bin/bash'. 'TMPDIR'->'/var/folders/sy/sndrtj9j1tq06j0lfnshmrl80000gn/T/'. 'FOO'->'beno����t'. 'Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render'->'/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.uWk7pivcLT/Render'. 'TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION'->'404'. 'TERM_SESSION_ID'->'845BECCD-0AB0-4686-B7F9-3A0FF84BDCB7'. 'USER'->'sven'. 'SSH_AUTH_SOCK'->'/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.y5oCwdUyaG/Listeners'. 'PATH'->'/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/texbin:/opt/X11/bin'. 'PWD'->'/tmp/benoi����t'. 'XPC_FLAGS'->'0x0'. 'XPC_SERVICE_NAME'->'0'. 'HOME'->'/Users/sven'. 'SHLVL'->'2'. 'LOGNAME'->'sven'. 'LC_CTYPE'->'UTF-8'. 'DISPLAY'->'/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.lsgASYFiWW/org.macosforge.xquartz:0'. 'SECURITYSESSIONID'->'186a9'. 'OLDPWD'->'/tmp/benoi����t'. '_'->'/tmp/benoi����t/pharo-vm/Pharo.app/Contents/MacOS/Pharo'. '__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING'->'0x1F5:0x0:0x0'}

Of course, if we change this, we will need to fix callers.

Opinions ?

Sven

PS: Furthermore, I note that there is a subtle difference in how $FOO and $PWD in the above are UTF-8 encoded. In the former, normalisation was done, in the latter not. Maybe that could lead to problems (when comparing/composing them). This is a difficult/complex subject (https://medium.com/concerning-pharo/an-implementation-of-unicode-normalization-7c6719068f43).