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Regional characters and terminal

Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2013 4:53 am
by Benzi Junior
I installed Maya last fall with Icelandic as my install language and it worked fine up until last week when Terminal stopped recognizing the Icelandic special characters such as þ æ ð and the accents ' and " and since a lot of directories have those characters in them I can't really navigate with terminal and certain programs don't open files in those directories since they don't recognize it's existance does anyone know how to get these characters back into terminal

Re: Regional characters and terminal

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 8:53 pm
by BozoDel
I just installed Nadia and I'm having the same issues (the only difference being that the language is Brazilian Portuguese).

In this thread, somebody complains of the same problem. Then one user said:
xenopeek wrote:This will happen if your LANG environment variable isn't set. You can check with:

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env | grep ^LANG=
It should say something similar to:

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LANG=en_US.UTF-8
When I use that command, I get:

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LANG=pt_BR.UTF-8
Which means it should be showing special characters, but it isn't. Any ideas?

Re: Regional characters and terminal

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 9:41 pm
by BozoDel
I went into Language Support, changed it to English, applied it system-wide, and rebooted. Stuff is still in Portugues and I still get

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LANG=pt_BR.UTF-8

Re: Regional characters and terminal

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:35 am
by bjornmu
Are those þ and ð in file names UTF-8 or 8-bit ISO-8859-1? In any case, if you need to enter those names in the terminal, replace the special character with ? and it should work, even as arguments to programs. Or use TAB for file name completion, that ought to work too.

FWIW, I had trouble with printing text in ISO-8859-1 and solved that my installing "good old" xterm and using that instead of the more modern terminal.

Re: Regional characters and terminal

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 9:24 am
by BozoDel
Replacing a special character with ? works (though just typing the correct character works too, even if it shows as ?).

But xterm and uxterm did no good. I think "the hole is further down"...

Re: Regional characters and terminal

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 10:03 am
by BozoDel
When using a variety of commands, I get

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Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
	Using the fallback 'C' locale.
I think it has to do with the problem.

SOLVED

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2013 5:24 pm
by BozoDel
Found a solution here.

I opened /etc/default, opened the terminal in that folder and typed

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sudo gedit locale
to edit "locale".

Then I erased everything in there and replaced it with

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LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
and rebooted. That did the trick.

I believe that the code for Icelandic would be "is_IS.UTF-8". Did that solve your problem, Benzi Junior?