Trying to get a windows rails environment going this morning I stumbled upon something interesting – all ‘a’ characters were missing from cucumber and rspec output.

This has something to do with UTF-8 encoding and there’s a ticket and wiki post on cucumber about it, but no solution that I found acceptable.

Everything comes down to having change encoding in the current cmd window. This is achieved via a simple call to chcp 1252, but nobody want’s to do this every time, right?

To get this executed automaticaly and without resorting to serious registry editing, simply add this line to your cucmber.bat and any other batch files that are exhibiting this problem. You can find cucumber.bat in your /ruby/bin folder.

Here’s what it looks like:

chcp 1252
@ECHO OFF
IF NOT "%~f0" == "~f0" GOTO :WinNT
@"ruby.exe" "c:/ruby/bin/cucumber" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
GOTO :EOF
:WinNT
@"ruby.exe" "%~dpn0" %*