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user9474
Asked: 2012-08-07 08:49:49 +0800 CST

How to make the 'less' command handle UTF-8?

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On my Mac terminal, printing UTF-8 works in general, but the less doesn't work correctly.

So this works correctly:

$  echo -e '\xe2\x82\xac'   
€

but piping it into less gives something like this:

$  echo -e '\xe2\x82\xac' | less  
<E2><82><AC>

How can this be fixed?

For diagnostics:

I'm using Mac OS 10.6.8. less version 418, Terminal 2.1.2 (273.1).

The output of my locale is this:

$ locale
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL="C"
mac-osx

5 Answers

  1. Okay, I found the answer after some googling. Apparently, LESSCHARSET needs to be set like this:

    export LESSCHARSET=utf-8

    Now less works fine for me.

    • 57

  2. If you can see some unicode characters in less, but are unable to get less to display emoji, try upgrading less to a more recent version. On Mac OS X, I went from version 458 to 481 and that fixed my problem (for example, git log can now display emoji in commit messages).

    If you have homebrew, you can replace the system less with a newer version by running brew install homebrew/dupes/less.

    • 6

  3. Works for me with

    LANG=
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="en_US.UTF-8"
    • 2

  4. I googled this and tried the following environment variables which worked for me:

    export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_us.UTF-8

    Seeing as I find the LC_ALL in multiple different answers I think this is the correct one. But maybe not the only right answer, there could of course be more correct answers to this question.

    Anyway some more googling gave me this description for the variable:

    LC_ALL This variable determines the values for all locale categories. The value of the LC_ALL environment variable has precedence over any of the other environment variables starting with LC_ (LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, LC_TIME) and the LANG environment variable.

    source: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xbd/envvar.html

    Leading me to think this is the language variable to rule them all :)

    • 1

  5. Just update you [less][1]

    Do it with brew.

    brew install homebrew/core/less
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