Name of the resource

Other

Resource Name

CloudFormation GetTemplate API

Issue Description

When the GetTemplate API is executed against a stack of templates containing non-ASCII characters, such as Japanese characters, the non-ASCII characters in the template are converted to question marks.

This makes it impossible to properly understand the contents of the template after deployment, and also makes it impossible for tools such as AWS CDK to properly display the diff of the template.
aws/aws-cdk#10523

This is a big problem for non-English speakers, who often include native language descriptions and logs in their templates. This is also expected to be a problem for English speakers when specifying emojis.

Expected Behavior

Given

Deployed as SampleStack

Resources:
  MySNS:
    Type: AWS::SNS::Topic
    Properties: 
      DisplayName: Helloこんにちは☺

When

$  aws cloudformation get-template --stack-name SampleStack

Expected

{
    "TemplateBody": "Resources:\r\n  MySNS:\r\n    Type: AWS::SNS::Topic\r\n    Properties: \r\n      DisplayName: Helloこんにちは☺\r\n",
    "StagesAvailable": [
        "Original",
        "Processed"
    ]
}

Observed Behavior

Actual

{
    "TemplateBody": "Resources:\r\n  MySNS:\r\n    Type: AWS::SNS::Topic\r\n    Properties: \r\n      DisplayName: Hello??????\r\n",
    "StagesAvailable": [
        "Original",
        "Processed"
    ]
}

Test Cases

Deploy a CloudFormation template that contains non-ASCII characters and call the GetTemplate API to see if the same content is returned as the template.

Other Details

• Resources created by CloudFormation correctly handle non-ASCII characters.
• a CDK issue blocked by this bug
  • [cli] cdk diff always reports diff if resource has non-ASCII characters aws/aws-cdk#10523
• API: GetTemplate/DescribeStacks do not properly return utf-8 characters #814