Characters are not displayed correctly

Owned by Elena Sviridenko (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Oct 22, 2019 by Alexandr Kudentsov (Unlicensed)
1 min read


Unix/Linux Platforms

This issue may be due to locale configuration. Check the output of the command ‘locale’. This will list your current locale settings. The output will look something like:

LANG=”C” LC_CTYPE=”C” LC_TIME=”C” … LC_ALL=”C”

It is necessary to set this (in particular, the LC_CTYPE value) to an 8-bit system locale. First, check the locale categories available on your system, using the command:

locale -a

This will produce a full list of installed locales. For your forms, you will need to use one of the locales from this list. Alternatively, you will have to install a new locale onto your machine.
xx_XX or xx_XX.character_set

For example, if you are looking for a Spanish locale, then ‘es_ES’ and ‘es_ES.ISO8859-1’ are examples of possible locales you would choose. Avoid locales of the form es_es, as these are 7-bit.
Once you have selected an appropriate locale category, apply this to your environment.

LC_ALL=es_ES.ISO8859-1 export LC_ALL


or, if you just want to set LC_CTYPE

LC_ALL=”” export LC_ALL
LC_CTYPE=es_ES.ISO8859-1 export LC_CTYPE