[PR #11742/bdd31745 backport][stable-12] nmcli: use get_best_parsable_locale() to support UTF-8 connection names (#11757)

nmcli: use get_best_parsable_locale() to support UTF-8 connection names (#11742)

* nmcli: start locale fix - normalize run_command environ to LANGUAGE=C, LC_ALL=C

Work in progress - issue #10384 (UTF-8 conn_name support) requires deeper
investigation beyond simple locale variable normalization.



* nmcli: use get_best_parsable_locale() to support UTF-8 connection names

Fixes issue where UTF-8 connection names (e.g. Chinese characters) were
corrupted to '????' when LC_ALL=C forced ASCII encoding, causing
connection_exists() to always return False for non-ASCII names.



* add changelog fragment for PR #11742



---------


(cherry picked from commit bdd3174563)

Co-authored-by: Alexei Znamensky <103110+russoz@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

changelogs/fragments/11742-run-command-locale-nmcli.yml

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+bugfixes:
+  - nmcli - use ``get_best_parsable_locale()`` to set locale environment for ``run_command()`` calls,
+    fixing UTF-8 connection names being corrupted to ``????`` under ``LC_ALL=C``
+    (https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/issues/10384,
+    https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/issues/11737,
+    https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/pull/11742).

plugins/modules/nmcli.py

@@ -1705,6 +1705,7 @@ RETURN = r"""#
 import re
 
 from ansible.module_utils.basic import AnsibleModule
+from ansible.module_utils.common.locale import get_best_parsable_locale
 from ansible.module_utils.common.text.converters import to_text
 
 
@@ -2915,7 +2916,8 @@ def create_module() -> AnsibleModule:
         ],
         supports_check_mode=True,
     )
-    module.run_command_environ_update = dict(LANG="C", LC_ALL="C", LC_MESSAGES="C", LC_CTYPE="C")
+    locale = get_best_parsable_locale(module)
+    module.run_command_environ_update = dict(LANGUAGE=locale, LC_ALL=locale)
     return module
 
 

tests/unit/plugins/modules/test_nmcli.py

@@ -1652,6 +1652,9 @@ def mocker_set(
     """
     Common mocker object
     """
+    mocker.patch(
+        "ansible_collections.community.general.plugins.modules.nmcli.get_best_parsable_locale", return_value="C"
+    )
     get_bin_path = mocker.patch("ansible.module_utils.basic.AnsibleModule.get_bin_path")
     get_bin_path.return_value = "/usr/bin/nmcli"
     connection = mocker.patch.object(nmcli.Nmcli, "connection_exists")