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Asked: 2011-05-31 18:51:38 +0800 CST

How do I change my locale to UTF-8 in CentOS?

  • 772

Here's the output of locale:

LANG=zh_CN.GBK
LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_NUMERIC="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_TIME="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_COLLATE="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_MONETARY="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_MESSAGES="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_PAPER="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_NAME="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_ADDRESS="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_TELEPHONE="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_MEASUREMENT="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="zh_CN.GBK"
LC_ALL=

How can I change all of them to UTF8? How can I make the locale setting persistent in CentOS 5.5?

centos language localization charset centos5

5 Answers

  1. In CentOS try with system-config-language command. That's the CentOS way :) Also you can try with:

    localedef -c -f UTF-8 -i en_US en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
    • 16

  2. Do you mean in the current session or permanently?

    If you just need it in the current shell you can export the LC_ALL variable. For example:

    export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

    If you mean to do it permanently or system-wide it varies from distribution from distribution. What's yours?

    • 6

  3. Red-Hat like distros (Centos, SL) come with file

    /etc/sysconfig/i18n

    which contains by default (well, in my case)

    LANG="en_GB"

    SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

    And above file is being sourced by /etc/profile.d/lang.sh

    I my case I wanted to change en_GB.UTF-8 to en_GB.iso88591 so I found that “proper” way of doing it was to append /etc/sysconfig/i18n with

    CHARSET="iso8895-1"

    Once that done locale for each account on the system should be saying:

    me@wark:~ $ locale

    LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

    LC_CTYPE="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_TIME="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_COLLATE="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_MONETARY="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_PAPER="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_NAME="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.iso88591"

    LC_ALL=en_GB.iso88591

    • 5

  4. As I suppose, after your encoding, your are chinese from mainland, you need first the chinese locale :

    localedef -i zh_CN -c -f UTF-8 zh_CN.UTF-8

    Then you can export you locale as :

    export LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8

    if you want to configure this system-wide :

    change /etc/locale.conf to:

    LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=zh_CN.UTF-8

    The second line is for rules about comparing string.

    Or for an user, you can just add it in you ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile

    • 1

  5. In CentOS 7, I was able to change the default system language by editing

    /etc/profile

    This is where the following variables are set

    export LANG="en_GB.utf8"
export LANGUAGE="en_GB.utf8"
export LC_ALL="en_GB.utf8"
    • 0