Asset pipeline corrupts Unicode characters in filenames during ManifestResources.hx generation

[mcoughlin133]

Environment:

• Lime: 8.2.2
• Haxe: 4.3.7
• OS: Windows 10
• System Encoding: Windows-1252

Issue:
When an asset filename contains Unicode characters (specifically em dash U+2014),
Lime generates corrupted ManifestResources.hx with replacement character (�).
The build will error with:
ERROR export/html5/haxe/ManifestResources.hx:1: character 1

1 | package;
| ^
| Malformed file. Source files must be encoded with UTF-8.

Reproduction:

1. Create file: "assets/Test — File.docx" (with em dash)
2. Run: lime build html5 -debug
3. Observe: ManifestResources.hx contains corrupted filename with �
4. Build fails with "Malformed file. Source files must be encoded with UTF-8"

Expected:
Either properly encode Unicode OR sanitize filenames to ASCII-safe characters

Workaround:
Rename file to use ASCII hyphen: "Test - File.docx"

[joshtynjala]

I can also reproduce this issue on Windows 11 with the more recent release, Lime 8.3.0.

Additionally, if I specify the file name in project.xml, it produces a different error:

<assets path="assets/Test — File.txt"/>

Error: Could not find asset path "assets/Test ΓÇö File.txt"

I do not see either error on macOS. It works correctly.

[tobil4sk]

I have been able to work around the issue by using lime build html5 -debug -eval, which gets the tools to run through eval instead of neko. It seems it is an issue specific to neko on windows.

[tobil4sk]

I was able to confirm that this is a neko bug: HaxeFoundation/neko#315

Neko should get patched eventually, but for now I think you'll just have to use -eval for this to work properly.

[joshtynjala]

Unfortunately, the eval flag won’t work for everyone. Some things tools does require CFFI, as I recall. Font support, maybe?

[tobil4sk]

I've opened a WIP neko PR to begin addressing the issue there: HaxeFoundation/neko#316
It's not ready as I'll have to go through the rest of the neko api to fix these issues everywhere, but I was able to build hello world with a unicode named asset, so downloading the ci builds from that PR might also be an option.