Troubleshooting

Cucumber not ripe? Can’t find your peeler? These are some common problems people have experienced. -And how to address them.

Console output isn’t right on Windows

Missing “a” characters in the output? Do your “æøå” characters print like garbled Commodore 64 characters? There are four steps to fix this.

First – make sure your .feature files are saved in UTF-8 format.

Second – add require 'cucumber/formatters/unicode' to your env.rb file.

Third – set your command window’s font to a font that has the characters you’re outputting – for example Upper Left corner icon menu → Properties → Font → Lucida Grande.

Fourth – in your command prompt, change the codepage:

chcp 1252

If you want to do this permanently – look here.
Now you should be able to get aæøå in your output on Windows.

Note that codepage 1252 is not UTF-8 – it’s essentially a superset of ISO-8859-1. Ideally you’d set it to 65001, which is UTF-8, but this has the unfortunate side effect of temporarily neutering all your computer’s bat files so they cannot be executed (including cucumber.bat and rake.bat).

For more info, see Lighthouse issue #81