[Bug]: Emoji added in any test title causes the ui to hang on Windows

[HardCodr]

Version

latest

Steps to reproduce

On a Windows 11 machine:

1. Create a test and add any emoji inside the description

await test("🖥️  some test", () => { expect(true).toBe(true) });

2. Open playwright in --ui mode
3. Run the test

Expected behavior

1. Test should finish execution
2. UI should be responsive

Actual behavior

1. Test hangs at "After Hooks"
2. UI is unusable

Additional context

I added emojis to my tests to have a visual distinction between tests. I love the playwright ui but having 100+ tests makes it a bit difficult to me to distinguish between the categories of API tests and regular tests.

Environment

Any Windows 11 machine (might happen on Windows 10 - haven't tested)

[yury-s]

This boils down to a bug in Node.js related to emojis in file names on Windows: nodejs/node#48673. Playwright tries to write a trace into a file that contains "example-🖥️-some-test" in its path and fs.mkdirSync just hangs.

[yury-s]

@HardCodr the problem is already fixed in Node v21.6.2, but apparently Node.js team is reluctant to backport the fix to LTS versions.

[vladimirp5]

Awesome! Thank you for your input!

[yury-s]

We could probably santitize some emoji symbols in the file names to mitigate the problem. There are multiple RegExp unicode char classes that we could match with something like /\p{Emoji}/gu.test("🖥️ some test"):

• Emoji
• Emoji_Presentation
• Emoji_Modifier
• Emoji_Modifier_Base
• Emoji_Component

Considering that Windows filesystem properly handles all of the characters in the file names and that there is just one report so far, we'd rather wait for the Node.js fix to be rolled out.