Re: [Nmh-workers] mhshow: unable to convert character set to utf-8, continuing...

[Ken Hornstein]

>What about mhshow allowing me to specify a filter ? Almost always, the 8 bit
>characters are easily replaceable by 7 bit characters. If the filter fails,
>then mhshow could do what it now does.

Well ... we do kinda support that as well.  An entry of the form
mhshow-charset-utf-8 in your mh_profile should do that.  Although don't
ask me how that interoperates with the mhshow changes; it's an untested
area.  Our general thinking was a) people would be using the internal
iconv support and b) people would be using locales that weren't US-ASCII.
We thought b) because it seems like Linux systems by default end up
using UTF-8, at least in my limited experience.

>I don't know how to change locales. "man -k locale" does not suggest anything.

I see the Linux man page for locale(1) is pretty lousy.  The BSD one does
a better job.  Here's the relevant snippet:

     LANG         Used as a substitute for any unset LC_* variable.  If LANG
                  is unset, it will act as if set to "C".  If any of LANG or
                  LC_* are set to invalid values, locale acts as if they are
                  all unset.

     LC_ALL       Will override the setting of all other LC_* variables.

     LC_COLLATE   Sets the locale for the LC_COLLATE category.

     LC_CTYPE     Sets the locale for the LC_CTYPE category.

     LC_MESSAGES  Sets the locale for the LC_MESSAGES category.

     LC_MONETARY  Sets the locale for the LC_MONETARY category.

     LC_NUMERIC   Sets the locale for the LC_NUMERIC category.

     LC_TIME      Sets the locale for the LC_TIME category.


You want to set one of LANG, LC_ALL, or LC_CTYPE.  What do you set it
to?  Well, someting that "locale -a" knows about, like "en_US.UTF-8".
Or maybe "en_US.ISO-8859-1". "en" being English, US being United States
(those get you English error messages and US things for time and money).
That's only half of the issue; you need to make sure your terminal is
compatible with your chosen locale, and that's outside of my scope.

--Ken