[macOS]: failed to launch from VSCode: ArgumentError - invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

_Issue moved from https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding/issues/586#event-2689960105_

I got this error when I was trying to launch macOS from VSCode:

Launching lib/main.dart on macOS in debug mode...
CocoaPods' output:
↳
      Preparing
    Analyzing dependencies
    Inspecting targets to integrate
      CDN: trunk Relative path: CocoaPods-version.yml exists! Returning local because checking is only perfomed in repo update
    ――― MARKDOWN TEMPLATE ―――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
    ### Command
    ```
    /usr/local/Cellar/cocoapods/1.8.1/libexec/bin/pod install --verbose

   ...

   ArgumentError - invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

   ...


    [!] Oh no, an error occurred.
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Error output from CocoaPods:
↳
        WARNING: CocoaPods requires your terminal to be using UTF-8 encoding.
        Consider adding the following to ~/.profile:
        export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

I have export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in my ~/.profile and have also configured VSCode as:

{
  "dart.env": {
    "LANG": "en-US.UTF-8",
  }
}

However, directly launch from terminal works:

flutter run -d macOS

My other targets web, ios and android work from VSCode.

[mrottler]

Never mind. It’s amazing how many times you can look at something and not see the error until after you post it! Anyway, once I fixed the entry for LC_ALL in my VS Code settings.json file, then the error went away for me too.

For reference, here’s the entry in my settings.json file that is working:

   "dart.env": {
        "LC_ALL": "en_US.UTF-8",
        "LANG": "en_US.UTF-8"
    }

Thank you @DanTup for your help with this. I am sorry for the noise.

[DanTup]

I’m seeing this on my Mac now, so was able to do some more debugging. Here’s my understanding of the issue:

• CocoaPods warns if the default encoding isn’t set to something UTF8 (which it gets from reading LANG etc.) because it affects how it reads files
• On macOS, the LANG env var is set by the terminal at startup - it is not set system-wide for programs not launched from the terminal
• If you launch VS Code outside of the terminal, it doesn’t have LANG set, that results in us spawning flutter run without it set, and that results in CocoaPods/Ruby using ansii encoding and breaking on UTF-8

The ideal fix would be “Dart-Code should just set UTF8” on all its processes - however LANG requires both a language part and encoding, so if LANG isn’t already set, we don’t know what to set this to. In VS Code it seems that Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().locale returns the correct thing for the main process, however it’s incorrect in the extension host.

I’ve opened https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/85675 to see if this can be fixed. Using dart.env is still the current workaround, but I think if VS Code can expose the system language to us, we could set this explicitly to avoid the need for that.