standard
Encoding of the hook input payload, which must be decoded explicitly rather than through the platform text layer.
No evidence-backed relationships are recorded.
A dev.to write-up traces two nights of hex dumps to a shell that exported PYTHONUTF8=1 on the laptop and nothing on the clean Linux box, where open() fell back to the POSIX locale's ASCII codec.
Reality
A dev.to workflow freezes each json.dumps call site as committed UTF-8 bytes before anyone extracts a helper. The harness pins three dialects in one module and leaves one behaviour change unpinned.
Reality
open() and subprocess.run(text=True) both fall back to whatever GetACP returns, so a UTF-8 file read on an en-US machine comes back as cp1252 mojibake with no exception raised, and chcp 65001 changes a different setting.
Reality
A dev.to writeup traces mojibake in a CSV import to Excel silently assuming the wrong encoding. The mangled names then fail search, joins and grouping downstream.
Reality
A PreToolUse hook on an AI coding agent returned "allow" for every file under a non-ASCII directory name, for weeks, with no log line and no exception.
Reality