---
name: tracker.py Windows encoding fix
description: tracker.py must set UTF-8 stdout/stderr on Windows or issue titles with unicode chars crash with UnicodeEncodeError on cp1252.
type: feedback
---

tracker.py crashed on `list --state closed` because some Gitea issue titles contain unicode replacement chars (from copy-paste dashes). Windows console defaults to cp1252 which can't encode them.

**Why:** Git-for-Windows bash uses cp1252 console encoding, not UTF-8. Any print() of non-ASCII text crashes without the encoding wrapper.

**How to apply:** The fix is already in tracker.py (lines 31-33): `sys.stdout = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stdout.buffer, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')`. Apply the same pattern to any new Python script that prints API data on Windows.
