Incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT while crawling a page which contains UTF Characters.

[starx]

Description

In a test, trying to verify contents of a web address by crawling is failing.

------Exception-------
Class: Kitchen::ActionFailed
Message: 1 actions failed.
Failed to complete #verify action: [incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT] on default-ubuntu-1604

Kitchen Log

InSpec and Platform Version

Inspec: 1.31.1
Kitchen: 1.16.0

Replication Case

A simple test case like this is enough. The page it is crawling should have Unicode characters. e.g. http://blog.mrnepal.com

describe command 'curl http://test.com' do
  its('stdout') { should match(/test_match/) }
end

I opened this issue previously in chef/inspec was instructed that issue was not related to Inspec but this repo instead.

[pratik705]

Hi,
I am hitting the exact issue on my test setup. any workaround/solution for the issue?

[lindhor]

Same for me in 1.43.5 and 2.2.27.

[lehn-etracker]

@pratik705 you can force message to be converted into UTF-8 by changing your local inspec reporter. Add .force_encoding(Encoding::UTF_8) within format_message method call like this:

lib/inspec/reporters/cli.rb:

format_message(
         color: impact,
         indicator: impact,
         indentation: 5,
         message: message.force_encoding(Encoding::UTF_8),
)

Btw: you will find the full path to cli.rb within trace message from your inspec call.

[greeneg]

I can confirm that @lehn-etracker 's fix resolves this when doing a kitchen verify on older Linux versions that use non-UTF8 encodings.

[chris-rock]

Thank you @starx for reporting the issue. I added a PR in InSpec to add a functional test to verify that this does not happen again. Once merged you need to update to latest inspec to prevent the issue happening.

[starx]

@chris-rock That is Great news.