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Tomas Aschan
Asked: 2011-12-13 10:40:41 +0800 CST

Switch encoding of terminal with a command

  • 772

One of the servers I quite often ssh to uses western encoding instead of utf-8 (and there's no way I can change that).

I've started writing a bash script to connect to this server, so I won't have to type out the entire address every time, but I would like to improve this script so it also changes the encoding of the terminal window correctly.

The change I need to do can be performed using the mouse by navigating to "Terminal"->"Set Character Encoding..."->"Western (ISO-8859-1)". Is there a terminal command that does the same thing, for the current terminal window/screen?

To clarify:
I'm not interested in ways of switching the locale of the system on the remote site - that system is administered by someone else, and I have no idea what stuff might depend on the latin-1 encoding there. What I want to do is to let this terminal window on my side switch character encoding to the above mentioned, in the same way I can do with my mouse and the menus.

command-line

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You are looking for luit which is designed for this purpose:

    $ luit -encoding ISO-8859-1 ssh remote.host

    It will convert the output of the ssh command to UTF-8 so you don’t need to change the encoding of the terminal.

    • 24

  2. First edit current locales in your favourite editor

    sudo gedit /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local to something like

    en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1
en_US.ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1

    Then run sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

    Then set terminal with LANG=en_GB.ISO-8859-1

    Hope that works

    • 4

  3. Gnome Terminal uses gconf to store settings. These can be manipulated with gconftool So, you can use:

    gconftool --set --type=string /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/encoding ISO-8859-1

    I've tested this on 12.04. For some reason, the menu ("Terminal"->"Set Character Encoding...") doesn't seem to get updated in real time, but the actual character encoding does correctly update.

    • 4

  4. On xterm, change the encoding by using control sequences. For instance, within bash you get the UTF-8 character set by running:

    echo -n $'\e%G'

    The ISO 8859-1 coding is accessible by running:

    echo -n $'\e%@'
    • 4

  5. I don't know how to test it, but with Konsole on Kubuntu I can do the following:

    1) Find application registered to dbus

    $ qdbus

    I use konsole so a simple qdbus | grep kons gives me org.kde.konsole

    2) Find current sessions in Konsole

    $ qdbus org.kde.konsole | grep Sessions
/Sessions
/Sessions/1

$ set | grep -i sessions
KONSOLE_DBUS_SESSION=/Sessions/1

    3) Find useful methods 

    $ qdbus org.kde.konsole /Sessions/1 | grep -i codec
method QByteArray org.kde.konsole.Session.codec()
method bool org.kde.konsole.Session.setCodec(QByteArray codec)

    4) Check current encoding

    $ qdbus org.kde.konsole /Sessions/1 org.kde.konsole.Session.codec
UTF-8

    5) Set encoding

    $ qdbus org.kde.konsole /Sessions/1 org.kde.konsole.Session.setCodec ISO-8859-1
true

    6) Check current encoding

    $ qdbus org.kde.konsole /Sessions/1 org.kde.konsole.Session.codec
ISO-8859-1

    Ubuntu will have a similar terminal program, but you'll have to do some puzzling yourself with correct servicename, path, method and arguments.

    • 3

  6. Here is another solution I used to change the profile (for background color) when connecting to a production server. It involves xdotool.

    xdotool will simulate the keystrokes needed to select the desired menu item. Try it with your keyboard first, then write down the sequence :

    $ xdotool key alt+t Down c Down Return

    It will activate the first character encoding. Add more Down keys before the Return to select other.

    Note: for ssh, you also can use a ~/.ssh/config file to configure aliases to your servers.

    • 2