Hi everyone,
Good news! I’ve just submitted a pull request that addresses a long-standing issue (~1 year!) affecting the “Mazy Mice” exercise in the awk-test-runner Docker image.
The Problem:
Some of you may have encountered tests for the “Mazy Mice” exercise failing when run using the official Docker test runner, even if they passed perfectly when run locally. This happened because “Mazy Mice” uses Unicode box-drawing characters (like ┌, ─, ⇨, etc.), and the Docker image was missing the necessary UTF-8 locale configuration to handle these characters correctly. While other exercises might not have triggered this specific problem, the underlying lack of proper Unicode locale support was present in the image.
The Solution:
The pull request updates the Dockerfile for the exercism/awk-test-runner image to:
- Install the
localespackage. - Configure and generate the
en_US.UTF-8locale. - Set the necessary environment variables (
LANG,LC_ALL) so that tools inside the container correctly interpret UTF-8 characters.
As a minor improvement, the Dockerfile commands also now use long-form options (e.g., --assume-yes instead of -y) for better readability.
Pull Request & Issue:
You can find the Pull Request with the changes here:
Pull Request
And the related GitHub Issue discussing the problem here:
GitHub Issue
Call for Review:
It would be great if some of you could take a look at the PR and provide feedback. This fix ensures the “Mazy Mice” exercise works correctly in the standard test environment and makes the runner robust for any future exercises that might rely on similar Unicode features.
Thanks to everyone involved in maintaining the AWK track!
Best regards,
Jegors
