Write/Edit tool fails with special characters in file content on Windows

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened May 30, 2026 by lwjlume Closed Jun 2, 2026

Bug Description

On Windows 10, the Write and Edit tools frequently fail with "Error writing file" / "Error editing file" when the file content contains special characters such as single quotes, backslashes, or XML-like sequences (e.g. </).

The model ends up retrying multiple times and eventually falls back to bash -c python -c "..." as a workaround.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Ask Claude Code to write a Python script containing single quotes or backslashes in string literals
  2. Observe repeated failures even after retries
  3. Model is forced to use Bash workaround

Expected Behavior

Write and Edit tools should handle arbitrary file content without failing due to special characters.

Actual Behavior

Repeated errors:

Error editing file
Error editing file
Error writing file

Model self-diagnoses: "单引号冲突" (single quote conflict) and falls back to:

python -c "with open('file.py','w') as f: f.write('...')"

Environment

  • OS: Windows 10 Home 10.0.19045
  • Shell: bash (Git Bash)
  • Claude Code version: latest (claude-sonnet-4-5)

Workaround

Using bash heredoc or python -c with file write works, but the native Write/Edit tools should handle this correctly.

View original on GitHub ↗

This issue has 2 comments on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗