Re: Cygwin 2.6.0: unreadable UTF-8 in Windows console

[Ivan Vanyushkin <vanav at vanav dot org>]

"set LANG=C.UTF-8" has fixed the issue on Cygwin 2.6.0. But documentation says [1], that
"The default locale in the absence of the aforementioned locale environment variables is "C.UTF-8"."
Seems this is broken in Cygwin 2.6.0.

"chcp 65001", console font or console charset doesn't matter here.

This is bad, because now I can't share compiled binaries to anyone, because users will have
no LANG in environment variable, and any non-ACSII text will not be readable.
For example, list running Windows services:
sc query | grep -i "running"
- will not work for not-English Windows, because output in console will not be readable.
Watch Windows log:
tail -f C:\Windows\Logs\SomeLog.log
- will be not readable if there are some non-English file names.

I think locale should remain default UTF-8, as in Cygwin 2.5.2. This is expected by both
applications and users.

Tests:

// Run Windows console.
cmd

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\echo ±5°> utf-8.txt

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\od -t x1z utf-8.txt
0000000 c2 b1 35 c2 b0 0d 0a                             >..5....<
// We have UTF-8 now in "utf-8.txt" file.

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="C.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="C.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="C.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="C.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="C.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\cat utf-8.txt
▒▒5▒▒

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\env LANG=C.UTF-8 C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\cat utf-8.txt
±5°
// Fixed! But what is default locale then?

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\env LANG=C.CP1251 C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\cat utf-8.txt
В±5В°

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\env LANG=C.CP866 C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\cat utf-8.txt
┬▒5┬░

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\env LANG=C.ISO8859-1 C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\cat utf-8.txt
±5°
// Doesn't match. I have no idea what is default locale in Cygwin 2.6.0.

// Let's try console native encoding
echo ±5°> cp866.txt

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\od -t x1z cp866.txt
0000000 2b 35 f8 0d 0a                                   >+5...<

type cp866.txt
+5°

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\cat cp866.txt
+5▒
// Bad. Cygwin 2.6.0 can't display even non-UTF-8.


// Try filenames:
ls -al
lrwxrwxrwx  1 vanav                        ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒       33 Sep 17 07:43 ''$'\320\234\320\276\320\270'' '$'\320\2
64\320\276\320\272\321\203\320\274\320\265\320\275\321\202\321\213' -> /cygdrive/c/Users/Vanav/Documents
// Bad.

C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\env LANG=C.UTF-8 C:\Cygwin_2.6.0\bin\ls -al
lrwxrwxrwx  1 vanav          система             33 Sep 17 07:43 'Мои документы' -> /cygdrive/c/Users/Vanav/Documents
// Good.


// Now try previous Cygwin 2.5.2.
C:\Cygwin_2.5.2\bin\locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="C.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="C.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="C.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="C.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="C.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

C:\Cygwin_2.5.2\bin\cat utf-8.txt
±5°
// Good.

C:\Cygwin_2.5.2\bin\env LANG=C.UTF-8 C:\Cygwin_2.5.2\bin\cat utf-8.txt
±5°
// Good.


[1] https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-locale.html



Saturday, October 1, 2016, 8:15:02 AM, you wrote:

> On 2016-09-30 22:34, Brian Inglis wrote:
> Sorry - this was mintty - you used cmd!
> Saw similar problems you had until I set LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 (and LANG
> for consistency, but doesn't really matter) and chcp 65001.
> Then type and Cygwin commands produce the same output.
> Without CP65001 (and a Unicode console font mapping most characters
> - I use DejaVu Sans Mono everywhere I can) there may be no valid
> encoding for UTF-8 special characters in your default console CP
> (437 for US, 850 for non-US, others for localized versions).
> Unfortunately then less displays spaces as squares, so you may have
> to set PAGER=more for readability.



-- 
Best regards,
 Ivan                            mailto:vanav@vanav.org


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