Non-English values in environment variables gets garbled on Windows

I discovered a problem today when I ran one of my modules on a computer running Windows. The cause of the problem was non-US characters in the users home directory (aka userprofile). The non-US characters in question was å, ä and ö. My only way of solving this was to rename the user account on the computer to a name with only English characters.

I managed to reproduce the problem with a minimal manifest that I include in this ticket. The manifest works fine if my user account is c:\Users\John but if I change it to c:\Users\Jöhn it destroys the Swedish character and instead outputs C:\Users\JA›ƒ,ªA?hn

This happens in an exec resource like this:

	exec { 'tomcat-configure-service':

		command  => "powershell.exe Get-ChildItem Env:",

		onlyif   => 'powershell.exe exit 0',      

		provider => windows,

		logoutput => true,

		#notify => $tomcat_service,

		tag      => 'tomcat-configure-service',

	}

To reproduce the error I ran it like this on Windows in cmd.exe:

set USERNAME=Jöhn

set USERPROFILE=C:\Users\Jöhn

M:\Virtual Machines\Puppet Windows development\synced_folder>puppet apply manifests\bug_swedish_userprofile.pp --test

In the output you can see the garbled text. I include the complete output in the attached file puppetrun.log. To also see it internally in Ruby I added logging to util.rb. Simply replace it in C:\Program Files\Puppet Labs\Puppet Enterprise\puppet\lib\puppet with mine.

This problem is a serious road block for running this in production so I would like to see it prioritized.