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Adventures in UTF-8

1:08pm, Wednesday 18 July 2007

I read that the new release of Debian had vastly improved UTF-8 support, so I gave it a whirl.

It was very simple - "dpkg-reconfigure locales" just about covers it - but I have to say that all the UTF-8 support in the world isn't going to help if, for historical reasons, your .bashrc contains the line

export LESSCHARSET=iso8859

(Oops.)

One unexpected side-effect is that all the Russian spam which had previously rendered as "??? ??? ???" now looks like this: "ЮР. УСЛУГИ (ПОДРОБНЕЕ)". Babelfish reckons that's some sort of 419 scam...

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