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Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:34:03 +0100
From: Thomas Wolff <towo AT towo DOT net>
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Subject: [Re:] Language vs character settings [Re: How to print textfiles  in Cygwin 1.7?]
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Niklaus Kuehnis wrote:
> ... As UTF-8 is generally the preferred charset, I would like to stick 
> to it. Does changing the language, e.g. to de_CH, change umlaut 
> handling? It doesn't seem to, here.
That depends...
If you just have LANG in your environment to indicate the UTF-8 
character set, or even no environment variable (meaning UTF-8 on cygwin),
and then set LANG=de_CH inside a terminal session, your environment and 
your actual terminal encoding will become inconsistent,
with the consequence that many programs (esp. all "modern" programs 
using the locale mechanism) will apply the wrong assumption about your 
terminal.

That's why my suggestion for a more practical setting is:
export LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8
to establish a more persistent declaration of your terminal's behaviour.
Then you can simply set LANG as you like to adjust other properties with 
any applications that honour it.

This didn't become the standard scenario, however, due to other 
considerations and compatibility with Linux distributions.
So my suggestion is to include this in your .profile:
export LC_CTYPE=${LANG-C.UTF-8}
to gain flexibility in changing LANG later.

------
Thomas

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