Pound Symbols Displaying Incorrectly

[Kilo]

Hi all,

I've searched for this and come up with no real results - maybe this board's US members have never come across this, I don't know...

Anyway, I've got a couple of fedora boxes, one running Core 3, another Core 4. On both boxes, if I 'vi' a file and attempt to insert a pound symbol (£), that single keystroke renders £

This is causing me a fair amount of pain because while MySQL stores it okay from web form submissions, and MySQL monitor renders it okay, if a user enters say £100 into a web form, then I try and load that data back into a web form, it appears as £100.


str_replace() can't be used to catch either 'Â' or '£' - any ideas?

I notice this board handles it okay - what am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.


Neil.

[drunkahol]

I've just done a vi test for you and got a single pound sign whenever I hit the pound key.

Try creating a blank file, vi'ing it and sticking a SINGLE pound sign in. Save the file and then do `wc` on the file. Is it two characters or just a single character in size? The do an ls -la on the file to see how many bytes it takes up.

Might have something to do with Unicode, but I'm not certain.

Cheers

Duncan

[Kilo]

Originally Posted by drunkahol

Try creating a blank file, vi'ing it and sticking a SINGLE pound sign in. Save the file and then do `wc` on the file. Is it two characters or just a single character in size? The do an ls -la on the file to see how many bytes it takes up.

Done - 3 bytes. Eh?!!

[Kilo]

Hello,

Right. p.txt is a text file containing only £ (no white space) which shows as £

The command wc p.txt yields

1 1 3 p.txt


Any ideas?! I guess I've got the charset wrong somewhere. Where do I go to adjust this (command line only)?

[drunkahol]

Try

system-config-keyboard --text

or the other "system-config-" commands in /usr/bin.

I've just grepped through /etc/ for anything with "gb" in it, but nearly everything has a "gb" in it somehow!

For the record, my single character vi file returns the following from wc:

[root@thinkpad ~]# vi test
[root@thinkpad ~]# cat test
£
[root@thinkpad ~]# wc test
1 1 3 test
[root@thinkpad ~]# ls -laFs test
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3 Apr  3 18:49 test
[root@thinkpad ~]#

I think I've run out of suggestions - sorry

Duncan

[Kilo]

Thanks. Both my ls -laFs and my wc results are the same.

When I type a pound sign at the command prompt it comes out fine (£), it's just in vi it appears as £.

[drunkahol]

Try

set

at the command prompt. It will list all your session parameters. Check for LANG and TERM. If they are different from what you expect, that would be a place to start.

Not sure if vi has a configuration file. Perhaps it's setting a session parameter incorrectly?

Duncan

[daverj]

Try this:

echo '£' > /tmp/filename

cat /tmp/filename and see if it is correct. Then vi it and see what it looks like. Your default vimrc file might be set to unicode. check /etc/vimrc. That's where the default file is (unless you have a .vimrc file in your home directory).

Dave

[tobyv]

I know this is a very old thread but I still haven't seen a good answer to this on Google.

I managed fix this same problem by setting the LC_CTYPE variable as follows:

export LC_CTYPE=en_GB.ISO8859-15

This was previously set to en_US.UTF-8

[Gareth Jones]

tobyv, if you are still having locale problems on a modern Fedora, please start a new thread. Mention the actual Fedora version that you are using, along with what software or desktop exhibits the problem.

Although the underlying locale mechanism (environment variables) hasn’t changed since ancient times, the common methods of choosing a system/user locale have moved on since FC2/4. At the very least, you want en_GB.UTF-8, not the old Latin9 encoding.

Thread closed and moved to EOF.