slackapi / slackapi/slack-skills-plugin
Non-ASCII characters returned as \uXXXX escape sequences instead of UTF-8
@stevengill is already working on this.
Since Mar 10, 2026.
- Dominant language
- Python
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Description
When reading messages from Slack channels via the MCP server (https://mcp.slack.com/mcp), all non-ASCII characters (Chinese/Japanese/Korean, etc.) are returned as JSON Unicode escape sequences (\uXXXX) instead of decoded UTF-8 text.
Example
The slack_read_channel tool returns:
{"messages": "Channel: #\u5c08\u6848\u8a0e\u8ad6\n\n=== Message from \u674e\u5927\u660e ===\n\u660e\u5929\u4e0b\u5348\u4e09\u9ede\u958b\u6703\uff0c\u8acb\u5927\u5bb6\u6e96\u6642\u53c3\u52a0"}
Expected (UTF-8):
{"messages": "Channel: #專案討論\n\n=== Message from 李大明 ===\n明天下午三點開會,請大家準時參加"}
Impact
AI agents consuming this output must infer CJK characters from hex codepoints, which leads to frequent misreadings of names and content — especially problematic for languages like Chinese where a single wrong codepoint produces a completely different character.
Suggested fix
Serialize JSON responses with ensure_ascii=false (or equivalent) so non-ASCII characters are output as UTF-8 directly.
Contributor guide
First steps
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Assessment
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