Xfce Forum

Ctwx

Member

Registered: 2010-12-21

Posts: 2

Does Xfce's Terminal support UTF-8?

Hi there!

Does Terminal support UTF-8? I couldn't find any information about this on Google nor in Terminal's settings GUI.
My problem is, when using iconv to convert files from ASCII to UTF-8 with

christian@tux-netbook:~/htdocs/sofa-website$ iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII startseite.php > startseite_utf8.php 

"file" still prints that my "UTF-8" file is ASCII:

christian@tux-netbook:~/htdocs/sofa-website$ file -i startseite_utf8.php 
startseite_utf8.php: text/html; charset=us-ascii

I have honestly no idea what to do now. I also had problems to tell my vim to use UTF-8 (I'm forced to use "set bomb".)

So is this a problem of Xfce's Terminal?

Thanks

gnome_refugee

Member

Registered: 2010-01-15

Posts: 169

Re: Does Xfce's Terminal support UTF-8?

Hi, Ctwx.

The command you copied shows you trying to convert *from* UTF-8 *to* ASCII.

Ctwx

Member

Registered: 2010-12-21

Posts: 2

Re: Does Xfce's Terminal support UTF-8?

Oh, sorry, but I also tried it otherwise:

christian@tux-netbook:~/htdocs/sofa-website$ iconv -f ISO-8859-15 -t UTF-8 -o startseite_u.php startseite.php 
christian@tux-netbook:~/htdocs/sofa-website$ file -i startseite_u.php 
startseite_u.php: text/html; charset=us-ascii

I think it's an os specific problem; a friend of mine successfully converted the file.

Pindakoe

Member

From: NL

Registered: 2003-11-26

Posts: 116

Re: Does Xfce's Terminal support UTF-8?

I think you are confusing things -- the Terminal's capabilities do not affect what a program executed from that terminal can do. They will affect what sort of input can be given or what sort of output can be displayed. Secondly -- I believe file will only call something if it finds usage of UTF-8 characters in it. This is may not be the case directly after conversion as the original coding may have only contained 'simple' ASCII. I haven't read through file's documentation -- so not completely certain -- but I noted that a 4 Kb text file (copied from an UTF/8 file) was identified as ASCII until I put an 'ë' in it. The simple act of adding this changed it to UTF8