Load-time sanitizer silently removed non-ASCII codepoints from any
env var ending in _API_KEY / _TOKEN / _SECRET / _KEY, turning
copy-paste artifacts (Unicode lookalikes, ZWSP, NBSP) into opaque
provider-side API_KEY_INVALID errors.
Warn once per key to stderr with the offending codepoints (U+XXXX)
and guidance to re-copy from the provider dashboard.
API keys containing Unicode lookalike characters (e.g. ʋ U+028B instead
of v) cause UnicodeEncodeError when httpx encodes the Authorization
header as ASCII. This commonly happens when users copy-paste keys from
PDFs, rich-text editors, or web pages with decorative fonts.
Three layers of defense:
1. **Save-time validation** (hermes_cli/config.py):
_check_non_ascii_credential() strips non-ASCII from credential values
when saving to .env, with a clear warning explaining the issue.
2. **Load-time sanitization** (hermes_cli/env_loader.py):
_sanitize_loaded_credentials() strips non-ASCII from credential env
vars (those ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY) after dotenv
loads them, so the rest of the codebase never sees non-ASCII keys.
3. **Runtime recovery** (run_agent.py):
The UnicodeEncodeError recovery block now also sanitizes self.api_key
and self._client_kwargs['api_key'], fixing the gap where message/tool
sanitization succeeded but the API key still caused httpx to fail on
the Authorization header.
Also: hermes_logging.py RotatingFileHandler now explicitly sets
encoding='utf-8' instead of relying on locale default (defensive
hardening for ASCII-locale systems).
