On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 11:02:30AM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
That's really wierd then. I run xubuntu 9.10 which, as you know, uses most of the same packages that Debian uses so should have a pretty similar iconv. (... and yes, I do see all your accented characters in the iconv'ed file)
Do you have ISO-8859-1 locale files installed? I was wondering if iconv needs a locale installed in order to be able to convert files to/from that locale. If I run "locale -a" it shows that I only have UTF-8 locales installed (plus C and POSIX).
Still it seems odd that iconv doesn't complain at all.
-- Chris Green
Well, not being quite sure of everything implied by "have ISO-8859-1 locale files installed", I did the following:
I did say 'If I run "locale -a"', the command "locale -a" will show you what locales are installed.
locate 8859-1 | grep locale
with results:
/usr/share/X11/locale/iso8859-1 /usr/share/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose /usr/share/X11/locale/iso8859-1/XI18N_OBJS /usr/share/X11/locale/iso8859-1/XLC_LOCALE
(along with similar output for iso8859-10,11,13,14,15).
Yes, I have those files too but "locale -a" doesn't show any iso8859 locales as being available. Ah, but "locale -m" *does* show that the iso8859-1 charmaps are available.
By the way: If I switch from X into a console terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1) and do as above with that file, then "less 400" produces the same result as in the xterm before (with "<hexcode>"'s where the accented characters are), but "cat 400" produces output in which all the accented characters are simply missing (no "?" and the like as in the xterm).
I'm talking about terminal windows (xfce4-terminal to be exact) running in X. I've just tried a couple of other terminal types (a real xterm and a gnome-terminal), no change.