From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021218 Description of problem: I don't know if this is a bug or feature, but I do know this is the wrong component. Please reassign to the right component. Any character with the high bit set will show the standard "unprintable character" symbol. I'm sure this is related to the switch to UTF-8, but I don't know what correct behavior is--I simply know that what used to work no longer works. According to Unicode.org, the first 256 glyphs in Unicode exactly match the glyphs in ISO-8859-1. So, it seems that codes 128-255 should be usable. If UTF-8 somehow reserves this bit, it would make sense that those characters would go away. But even if this is the case, I do not see any Unicode characters when I try to look at 8-bit characters. If the code is not correct to generate a Unicode character on the console, would it not help compatibility to fall back to ISO-8859-1 in these cases? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: cat a file containing 8-bit text Actual Results: Nothing but unprintable character symbols wherever the high bit is set. Expected Results: "Latin Extended" characters (primarily accented characters in Unicode/ISO-8859-1) should show up. Additional info:
What does your /etc/sysconfig/i18n look like?
Contents below: LANG="en_US.UTF-8" SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16" Bog standard config, out of the box. I'll come up with a good demo file to demonstrate the problem (but I'm sleepy now and it'll have to wait)
No. The fact that Unicode and ISO-8859-1 contain the characters at the same position doesn't mean that the encoding is the same. Unicode is encoded using UTF-8, which uses a different way to represent characters withcodes > 127 (If it were compatible with iso-8859-1, there would be no way to add other characters!). NOTABUG IMHO, you can use iconv to convert the file, or revert to non-UTF-8 locale.
Thanks very much. I know just enough about this to know what you're talking about, but not much more ;) I'll check out the iconv program. Looks very useful. I agree that this is probably NOTABUG.