centos locale utf-8

Question

This is my linux box:

• CentOS Linux release 6.0 (Final)
• x86_64

Using a text editor (vi, or pico...) I see strange characters for accented letters (è, ì, à, ù)

This is my locale:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

If I switch to iso-8859-9 like this:

export LANG="en_US.ISO-8859-1"

I see the characters correctly, but I must use utf-8 on this server.

Any idea?

Answer 1

Your description is vague. Either your terminal does not support Unicode, or you're editing a file that's in latin1 (= iso-8859-1).

On a bash or zsh shell, with LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8, run echo $'\xc3a9'. If you see é, your terminal supports UTF-8. If you see é, your terminal is showing latin1.

If your terminal doesn't support UTF-8, you need to get one that does. Or, possibly, configure yours so that it does.

If you determine that your terminal supports UTF-8, but you see things like é when you display a file that contains é, then the problem is that your files are encoded in latin1. Recode them to UTF-8.