Encoding Problems when using Execute Shell Script

[iandol]

This shell script takes the contents of the clipboard, then converts it using pandoc, then pastes the output back to the clipboard. The problem is that unicode characters get mangled:

Input: An—emdash

Output: AnÑemdash

If I run the same command from my terminal, the output is fine:

> echo "An—emdash" | pbcopy
> pbpaste | /opt/homebrew/bin/pandoc -d text-refs | pbcopy
> pbpaste
An—emdash

Note -d text-refs is a local config, you should be able to get the same result if the pandoc command is pandoc -f markdown -t plain. In the terminal unicode is preserved, but in BTT the output wrongly encoded...

Device information:

• Type of Mac: M2 macbook air
• macOS version: 15.3.1
• BetterTouchTool version: 5.204

[iandol]

@iandol

pbpaste | /opt/homebrew/bin/pandoc -d text-refs | pbcopy

I tried running this using Alfred:

And the encoding is fine...

Input: An—emdash

Output: An—emdash

[iandol]

I think I solved this. The technical background is that BTT runs scripts in an empty environment, not the user's environment. That means no shell setup is available. So the $LANG variable is empty, and thus the encoding problem (I think it defaults to latin1, surely utf8 should be default by now!?). The solution is to define $LANG, so the script would be:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
pbpaste | /opt/homebrew/bin/pandoc -f markdown -t plain | pbcopy

This seems to preserve unicode characters now.

You add it to this field too: