Special character in universal variable results in warning message on startup ("Unable to parse universal variable message")

[nrnrnr]

Special character in universal variable results in warning message on startup ("Unable to parse universal variable message")

[faho]

When I do the same thing with an empty home tree, I don't get the warning message, but the universal variable barf is incorrectly set to the empty string.

No, it's correctly unset. Universal variables are kept in $HOME, if you set $HOME elsewhere they won't be loaded.

---

Alright, seems the encoding is borked. I think @ridiculousfish is the correct person to ask here.

[nrnrnr]

When I do the same thing with an empty home tree, I don't get the warning message, but the universal variable barf is incorrectly set to the empty string.

No, it's correctly unset. Universal variables are kept in $HOME, if you set $HOME elsewhere they won't be loaded.

I launch the new shell with the temporary $HOME, set the universal variable in that new shell, but both echo $barf and count $barf indicate that $barf is the empty string.

[mqudsi]

I proposed switching to UTF-8 encoding for these as part of my argument in favor for #9763