AndroLog returns 0% code coverage when using PowerShell on Windows due to encoding mismatch

[Florence-Njeri]

Description:

Hi professor, I encountered a major blocker while generating code coverage for my instrumented application. The issue was that I was capturing and saving logcat logs using PowerShell on Windows, which by default saves files in UTF-16 encoding. However, AndroLog expects UTF-8 encoded log files for parsing. This caused me to consistently get 0% code coverage despite having valid METHOD entries in my logs.

Root Cause:

PowerShell's > redirect operator saves files in UTF-16 LE (with BOM) by default, which breaks AndroLog's log parser. This is a Windows PowerShell-specific issue that doesn't affect Mac/Linux users where the default encoding is UTF-8.

Solution:

After modifying my PowerShell command to explicitly save the output as UTF-8, the code coverage generation worked correctly.

Working command for Windows PowerShell users:

adb logcat -v threadtime MY_SUPER_LOG:D *:S | Out-File -FilePath logs.txt -Encoding UTF8

Suggestion:

It would be helpful to add a note in the README about this Windows PowerShell-specific encoding issue to help future users avoid this problem.

[hybd123]

I also encountered this issue—thank you for pointing it out! By the way, I was able to successfully compute code coverage on Ubuntu.