How do I change a shell scripts character encoding?

Question

I am using Gina Trapiani's excellent todo.sh to organize my todo-list.

However being a dane, it would be nice if the script accepted special danish characters like ø and æ.

I am an absolute UNIX-n00b, so it would be a great help if anybody could tell me how to fix this! :)

I've successfully used todo.sh with extended characters on Mac OS X.. Which platform are you using? — smokris
– smokris, Commented Jan 10, 2010 at 22:04

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:13:41Z

22

Slowly, the Unix world is moving from ASCII and other regional encodings to UTF-8. You need to be running a UTF terminal, such as a modern xterm or putty.

In your ~/.bash_profile set you language to be one of the UTF-8 variants.

export LANG=C.UTF-8
or
export LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
etc..

You should then be able to write UTF-8 characters in the terminal, and include them in bash scripts.

#!/bin/bash
echo "UTF-8 is græat ☺"

See also: https://serverfault.com/questions/11015/utf-8-and-shell-scripts

edited Apr 13, 2017 at 12:13

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answered Jan 10, 2010 at 21:55

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3 Comments

ephemient Over a year ago

On a TTY (not xterm), the terminal might not be UTF-8 capable until unicode_start is run. (This is unrelated to locale and shell/application support.) Some distributions enable this at boot, but some don't.

Yamaneko Over a year ago

Unrelated to OP's question, but posting just for the record. This fixed the issue I had when debugging a Python script with ipdb. It was returning *** UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u22f1' in position 314: ordinal not in range(12) every time I tried to print a variable. I tried to set LANG=en_US.UTF-8, but only by setting to export LANG=C.UTF-8 that it worked.

Andrea Grandi Over a year ago

I came here exactly for the ipdb problem, but while I'm able to correctly print this: echo "UTF-8 is græat ☺", I'm still getting the UnicodeEncodeError in ipdb :(

Dennis Williamson · Accepted Answer · 2010-01-10 21:56:33Z

What does this command show?

locale

It should show something like this for you:

LC_CTYPE="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

If not, you might try doing this before you run your script:

LANG=da_DK.UTF-8

You don't say what happens when you run the script and it encounters these characters. Are they in the todo file? Are they entered at a prompt? Is there an error message? Is something output in place of the expected output?

Try this and see what you get:

read -p "Enter some characters" string
echo "$string"

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