GNU Dialog and UTF-8 characters

Question

I'm using GNU dialog in one of my lengthy shell scripts. One of the areas I've got problems with is when I'm asking for an inputBox where the user can type a book's title, mostly in French.

In this inputBox, entering accented characters (éàè are very common in French), or special UTF-8 characters such as the em-dash "—" shifts the cursor 4 characters right, instead of one. After 3 or 4 "special" characters, the inputbox is completely unusable because of this artifact.

Similarly, when I display a menu with dialog, accented characters shift the right border of the dialog box. That's less handicapping than in the inputBox, but yet it's a visual discomfort.

I've tried all kinds of stuff to get this working, to no avail.

For the record, here are my LC_* environment vars:

LC_PAPER=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_TIME=fr_FR.UTF-8
LC_NAME=fr_FR.UTF-8
LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8

What could I do?

(Edit: as stated below, I'm on a Mac, and the same problem arises whether I use iTerm2 or the built-in Terminal emulator.)

Answer 1

I know it's an old question, but neverthereless the answer might be useful...

I solved the problem setting the following environment variable:

export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1

I have putty with the putty-256color Terminal string and a RHEL6 machine. It also works when using tmux or screen. For more information about this variable, just call 'man 3 ncurses'.

Answer 2

Make sure your terminal is in UTF-8 mode. If you are setting the locale variables from your ~/.bashrc as some do, then they will apply to the shell, but not to its parent terminal. Use tr \\0 \\n </proc/$PPID/environ to check whether the terminal has the same locale variables. (Some (such as GNOME Terminal) have an explicit character encoding menu, which you can use instead.)

Also, make sure the locale is listed by locale -a – if it is not, edit /etc/locale.gen and run locale-gen as root.

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Note that it is not recommended to set LC_ALL unless necessary, as this makes overriding the more-specific variables impossible. Just LANG is enough