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Matifou
Asked: 2016-10-21 09:59:47 +0800 CST

meld shows output in unreadable alphabet (Japanese/Chinese?)

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I am using meld to visualise a diff between two files. meld shows the diff output in... something like Japanese or Chinese?

Any idea what could happen? A locale issue? What is strange is that when using diff or colordiff in terminal, they work perfectly!

Thanks!

Meld shows unreadable output

diff

3 Answers

  1. Same problem here: File encoding is not correctly detected.

    In my case this is due to meld's "detect-encodings" settings.

    Check with:

    $ gsettings get org.gnome.meld detect-encodings
['utf8']

    Only utf8 is detected.

    To workaround this issue add 'latin1' or whatever encoding your file has:

    $ gsettings set org.gnome.meld detect-encodings "['utf8','latin1']"
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  2. Short extension to the last answer:

    I had to add quotes to the [] part:

    gsettings set org.gnome.meld detect-encodings "['utf8','latin1']"

    executing it in a terminal in Ubuntu 16.04

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  3. I am pretty sure this is a encoding issue. Your terminal is probably in UTF-8 and the file is ISO. This is a new problem as early as 16.04, I think it may happen in 15.04 as well but I can confirm that it doesn't in 12.04.

    Try checking your terminal where you are running meld by typing "locale". and you should get something like this:

    $ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

    Then type " file " for each of your files and make sure they match your terminal.

    On a side note I have been having a number of encoding issues between UTF-8 and ISO that really should never happen in 16.04.

    What worked for me was running iconv on each file:

    iconv -f ISO-8859-15 -t UTF-8 file_1.txt >file_1.tmp;
iconv -f ISO-8859-15 -t UTF-8 file_2.txt >file2.tmp;
mv file_1.tmp file_1.txt;
mv file_2.tmp file_2.txt;
meld file_1 file_2
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