Arch Linux

firedance

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2005-04-18

Posts: 131

what character encoding do I have, change filenames [solved]

Oki, I was going to write a longer subject but it was to long.
but my question is how do i know what character encoding i have on my system, and how do i change all filenames on the system to use it (or let me replace all weird chars with the right one).

The reason i ask is because i took alot of files from a friend, and everything seems fine exept the swedish characters åäö, since these become questionmarks in aterm and boxes with numbers in them in some programs (e.g firefox) it looks like this: †
(ps. the char changed after posting, but it was a square with four numbers in it, two on top and two on the bottom)

---
Solved:
I think it's solved now, i combined find and convmv.
this is the command line i got at the end:

find -not -iname '*å*' -not -iname '*ä*' -not -iname '*ö*' -not -iname '*é*' -exec convmv --notest -f cp850 -t iso-8859-1 {} ;

But i think i have to run it twice since it changed directory names and then find complained that they didn't exist

knappen

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2006-08-07

Posts: 15

Re: what character encoding do I have, change filenames [solved]

What kind of encoding do you have in Firefox?

firedance

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2005-04-18

Posts: 131

Re: what character encoding do I have, change filenames [solved]

In the menus it has that square (like in file open dialouge) but if i go to the dir where it is it has a questionmark (like file:///home/firedance/) and under view->character encoding it says i have western, but if i change to utf it's still a questionmark.
edit-
and if i click it in firefox it says file not found, this is why i wanna change the names so it works in all applications, the character encoding isn't so important, just to get some way to replace all questionmarks with their right character.
edit-2
I found this program named convmv, but i can't figure what encoding and to what encoding =/

jaboua

Member

Registered: 2005-11-05

Posts: 634

Re: what character encoding do I have, change filenames [solved]

Norwegian characters ÆØÅ all work fine here, I belive I use UTF8.

If it's to any help, I have this (standard I belive) in rc.conf:

LOCALE="en_US.utf8"

And these are uncommented in /etc/locale.gen:

en_US.UTF-8     UTF-8
en_US   ISO-8859-1
fr_FR.UTF-8     UTF-8
fr_FR   ISO-8859-1
nb_NO.UTF-8     UTF-8
nb_NO   ISO-8859-1

After you change locale.gen, remember to run locale-gen as root. I'm not sure however if the locale settings only change what languages are available in apps...

Also you should check if all required xorg parts are installed, and that fonts with swedish chars available is used... The boxes with numbers in are used in GTK apps when there is not any font available that can show it. I belive it shows the binary code or something of the char.

Just tested, aterm don't seem to show æøå here either - but urxvt (rxvt-unicode) shows it fine.

When you write the chars yourself in firefox, do they show correctly? I can read them as the correct swedish characters...

knappen

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2006-08-07

Posts: 15

Re: what character encoding do I have, change filenames [solved]

I don't get any swedish characters in aterm either.