Das Werkstatt

[PROBLEM]
I just ran into an umlaut-problem, again. *sigh*

The umlaut within a filename was displayed as question mark "?". I'm using bash, so doing a "ls -b *" revealed the character code "\366".

I've tried changing the terminal encoding between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1, as well as the $LANG environment variable. The only thing that changed was that a box was displayed instead of a question mark.

(Unfortunately, I wasn't able to simply use "\366" instead of that character)


[SOLUTION]
The file was created by someone using the "de_DE.ISO-8859-1" locale, and I was using "en_US.UTF-8". great.

Now both, the $LANG environment variable and the terminal encoding must be changed (and should match each other).

So I did: ...and then changed KDE's Konsole encoding (from Default to):

In order to get rid of non-unicode characters once and for all, you should change their encoding.

but how?

Here's a (maybe brute) way to do it:

1) Change your terminal's encoding and $LANG variable to match the special character's encoding. e.g. "de_DE.ISO-8859-1"

2) Now rename the file to be free of any special characters.

3) Reset your terminal's encoding and $LANG variable to proper unicode. e.g. "de_DE.UTF-8"


Maybe quick and dirty, but standards-compliant because it works on almost any system without the need for a special tool.