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I am writing a console program in C.

I expect the Terminal that my program is running in to have its character encoding set to UTF-8. This means that I am sending UTF-8 encoded strings to the Terminal, and expecting to receive UTF-8 encoded strings from the Terminal.

But if the Terminal was set to another character encoding (other than UTF-8) while my program is running, then my program will stop working as expected.

So is there a way to know what character encoding the Terminal is set to from within my program (so that I can change my program behavior accordingly)? And even if there is such a way, should I even bother making my program work with multiple character encodings, or is it enough to only make it work with UTF-8?

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UTF-8 has several pitfalls and for this reason is not the typical encoding in central Europe.

Writing programs that assume UTF-8 is bad practice as you may not be able to even know where a "character" ends in the byte stream.

A decent program calls:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "")

at startup and later uses functions like:

mbtowc(&wc, input, amt)

to convert multibyte input read from stdin or files.

It then processes the data as wide characters and converts it back to multibyte data via:

wctomc(output, wc)

then the output is printed to e.g. stdout.

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  • UTF-8 is the only sensible external encoding for Unicode text. Your answer does not consider how to choose between different encodings, and thus does not answer the question at all. Commented Jun 6, 2018 at 16:58
  • You are mistaken. Unicode causes problems that people did not expect. Many people for this reason use ISO-8859-1. The question does not ask how to set up a different encode, just how to deal with different encodings. So my answer is a good starter for further reading, by e.g. using the man program on the mentioned interfaces. Commented Jun 6, 2018 at 17:03

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