6

I've become stumped trying to get my terminal to show unicode characters. I've set the LOCALE/LANG environment variables to en_US.utf8:

locale LANG=en_US.utf8 LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8" LC_TIME="en_US.utf8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8" LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8" LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8" LC_NAME="en_US.utf8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8" LC_ALL= echo -e '\xe2\x82\xac' ���

Everything I've found says to set the LANG and LOCALE vars, which I have done, but the problem persists. locale -a shows that the right locale is available:

Laptop:~:0:2030$ locale -a | grep utf de_AT.utf8 de_BE.utf8 de_CH.utf8 de_DE.utf8 de_LI.utf8 de_LU.utf8 en_AG.utf8 en_AU.utf8 en_BW.utf8 en_CA.utf8 en_DK.utf8 en_GB.utf8 en_HK.utf8 en_IE.utf8 en_IN.utf8 en_NG.utf8 en_NZ.utf8 en_PH.utf8 en_SG.utf8 en_US.utf8 en_ZA.utf8 en_ZM.utf8 en_ZW.utf8 es_AR.utf8 es_BO.utf8 es_CL.utf8 es_CO.utf8 es_CR.utf8 es_DO.utf8 es_EC.utf8 es_ES.utf8 es_GT.utf8 es_HN.utf8 es_MX.utf8 es_NI.utf8 es_PA.utf8 es_PE.utf8 es_PR.utf8 es_PY.utf8 es_SV.utf8 es_US.utf8 es_UY.utf8 es_VE.utf8 fr_BE.utf8 fr_CA.utf8 fr_CH.utf8 fr_FR.utf8 fr_LU.utf8 ga_IE.utf8 nl_AW.utf8 nl_BE.utf8 nl_NL.utf8 pl_PL.utf8

I have also verified that this isn't limited to the CLI. Doing, for instance, u+2713 in VIM (which is something I use often), also gives a <?> character output.

In the gnome-terminal options, I have it set to use the default system font, but have tried all the fonts in the list with no assistance, and googling for "terminal unicode font" just continues the cycle of telling me to set my LOCALE/LANG.

--

Edit: As suggested below, I changed the locale/lang to en_US.UTF-8, which did not solve the problem:

Laptop:~:0:2013$ locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 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= Laptop:~:0:2014$ echo -e '\xe2\x82\xac' ���
Improve this question
1
  • For me helped changing the Font to MS Gothic - the one that supports unicode symbols. Commented Jan 6, 2021 at 17:26

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
8

The solution was much simpler. I had to go to the GUI settings for gnome-terminal, visit Terminal -> Set Character Encoding -> UTF-8.

-- To keep this as the default in Ubuntu (and sorry to find out that it's a distro-specific solution in this SE forum):

gconftool --set --type=string /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/encoding en_US.UTF-8

Improve this answer
3
  • 3
    Yeah. gnome-terminal still insits that ANSIX... is the current locale setting. I'll update the answer if I figure out how to change the default, because it still goes back to that when a new terminal window is opened. Thanks for your help with trying to figure this out. Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 16:39
  • 1
    Why it wasn't set to that in the first place is beyond understanding. GUI stuff. Anyways, that's great! You're welcome there! Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 16:52
  • Thank you! I've been trying to figure out the same problem for months. Commented Jan 9, 2014 at 14:17
2

I had the same problem with Terminal -> Set Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) correctly set. The problem was fixed by setting the encoding to something else and then back to UTF-8. The visible characters did not change right away, but newly typed started appearing correctly. No need to restart anything.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.