Q : character set on the terminal

From: Gros Loup (sebastien.millet_at_free.remove-this.fr)
Date: 04/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 08:38:41 +0200

Hello,

i am using red hat 9 and program's display/output (ls, vim, ...) into
terminal does not print French accent characters correctly.
I tried to tune the LANG and SUPPORTED variables, I tried to use
TERMENCODING with no result.

It looks like the terminal uses UTF-8, whereas programs consider it is
ISO_8859-1 by default. For example, inside Vim (launched from KDE's
xterm), if I execute
        :set termencoding=utf-8
accent characters are displayed correctly.
Also note that gvim displays correctly as soon as the LANG variable is
set to ISO_8859-1 instead of UTF-8 (so it always works now since it's
the default on my computer). But ls outputs still displays broken accent
characters.
Also executing setfont with various unicode parameters didn't fix.

I guess in some init script a "UTF-8" parameter is still there but no
way to find it. Hope it's not related to compilation parameters of
programs...?

Any hint ?

Gros Loup from Grenoble, France