national character sets

[George Shapovalov]

Are you doing this all in the Mandrak 'konsole', Are you using kde as your
windows manager? There is an issue of localisation/using the right fonts in
Mandrake. Its default terminal does miserably in that respect and shows 8-bit
characters as question marks in many cases. I could not help this but to
reinstall kde myself.
    As for a quick check, try using rxvt instead. Lanch it with such command:
rxvt -fn "your-font-with-necessary-charset-here"
Be carefull with some versions of xfree and true type fonts, some times
character width is miscalculated.

George


Prof Abimbola Olowofoyeku wrote:

> On 24 Apr 01, at 3:00, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
>
> [...]
> > > What I am trying to do is to get the program to recognise and
> > > translate non-English characters correctly. For example, in my unzip
> > > code, unless I do this, certain characters in filenames inside the zip
> > > file (e.g., umlauts, or accented characters) might end up being wrong,
> > > and the file when extracted then get a wrong name (or trying to create
> > > it fails because the name contains "illegal" characters).
> >
> > So the system uses different charsets for file names and for text
> > I/O?
>
> To be honest with you, I am not sure. All I know is that a Danish or
> German word (i.e., with characters that are not in the normal English
> alphabet) will, if not converted from "OEM" to "Ansi" (or now, to
> "char"), not display correctly, and, if it is a filename, then the filename
> will not be correct either. So, to display the text or create the file
> correctly, you need to do the conversion first.
>
> > You could look at the Info-ZIP code to see if/how it handles the
> > issue under Unix, or try some zip file with problematic characters
> > and see if unzip under Linux does any conversion and if the result
> > is correct. (If you don't have a Linux machine handy, you can send
> > me such a file to try it.)
>
> unzip fails most miserably under Linux. Of course, "unzip -l" displays
> the supposed contents of the zip file, but the names are totally wrong
> (truncated in most cases on encountering the first "foreign"
> character). "unzip -d" makes a brave attempt to extract the files, but all
> the "foreign" characters in the filenames are replaced by the "?"
> character. So the filenames are totally wrong as well. Windows tries to
> make some sense of the characters - but unzip under Linux doesn't
> even try (which is what I assume the question marks to mean).
>
> I can send you a sample zip file if you want.
>
> So the question of how to convert these "foreign" characters to
> something that the OS can understand remains. Like I said before,
> there is a simple WinAPI routine that does that, but I am trying to find
> a portable solution from gcc or other (L)GPL libraries.
>
> It may of course be that my Linux (Mandrake 7.1) is broken - but I
> don't see why that should be so, since everything else works.
>
> Best regards, The Chief
> --------
> Prof. Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief)
> Author of: Chief's Installer Pro for Win32
>   http://www.bigfoot.com/~African_Chief/chief32.htm
> Email: African_Chief at bigfoot.com