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! :)

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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"