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Whatsit
Asked: 2009-05-29 07:47:34 +0800 CST

How to find out if a terminal supports UTF-8

  • 772

I'm setting up the CPAN module for perl on CentOs 5, and one of the questions is 'Does your terminal support UTF-8?' (paraphrased). How do I find out?

terminal utf-8

7 Answers

  1. Type this in your terminal:

    echo -e '\xe2\x82\xac'

    If your terminal supports UTF-8 it will output the euro sign:

    €
    • 25
  2. Best Answer

    Really, the surefire way to test is to download a text file and cat it in the terminal and see if everything looks ok.

    or, if you can, recompile the terminal enabling the unicode option (assuming it has one).

    what does $TERM and $LANG look like?

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  3. The lamest way: run following and check the output. It will be a capital O with circumflex if the terminal displays UTF-8.

    perl -le 'print "\x{c3}\x{94}"'
    • 5

  4. The most sure fire way is to use the ‘locale’ command. It will print out all the various and sundry variables that dictate what character set to use. For instance, this is my output on RHEL5.3, set to only use UTF-8 by default.

    LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
    • 2

  5. You may just use the following command:

    locale charmap
    • 1 
  6. curl http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt

    or

    wget -O - http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt

    This obviously requires wget or curl.

    • 1 
  7. UTF=$(echo -e "\u263A")
if [[ ! "$UTF" =~ "A" ]]  ; then
 echo -n "UNICODE here!"
fi
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