The bundled office skills (#68595) read user documents and agent-authored
payloads with the locale-default codec:
- docx/powerpoint validators/base.py opened OOXML part XML in text mode
before handing it to lxml. On Windows (cp1251/GBK) the bytes decode to
mojibake that lxml then parses, so validation runs against silently
corrupted document text; on locales where the UTF-8 bytes don't decode
the validator crashes with UnicodeDecodeError instead of validating.
Opening as bytes lets lxml honor the encoding declared in the XML prolog.
- The pdf form scripts (fill_fillable_fields, fill_pdf_form_with_annotations,
create_validation_image, check_bounding_boxes) read the fields JSON the
agent authors — UTF-8 by construction — with the locale codec, so
non-ASCII form values (any Cyrillic/CJK/accented input) either crash or
get written into the user's PDF as mojibake. The json.dump writers use
ensure_ascii=True and were already safe; only the readers needed pinning.
Adds a contract test asserting every document/payload reader is
locale-independent, plus a live regression test that runs
check_bounding_boxes.py on a non-ASCII fields.json under a forced
non-UTF-8 locale — it fails without the fix on both POSIX (C locale)
and Windows (cp1251 chokes on the 0x98 byte of U+2018).
