Character Encoding of Keyboard Input

saintmike has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Esteemed monks,

I'm trying to find out what happens if a user with an international keyboard types something like

$ myprogram Belvédère
[download]

Which format does the application myprogram get the accented characters in, ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8? I guess this would depend on the type of terminal used, so let's say, Linux/X11?

Also, is there a general rule or a way to find out, like, by looking at the locale?

I can't really reproduce it here without an intl keyboard, any help is greatly appreciated ...

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Re: Character Encoding of Keyboard Input by gaal (Parson) on Mar 02, 2005 at 18:31 UTC
This depends on the locale. On modern linux systems, it would often be something like `en_US.UTF-8`, and the terminal emulator would be `xterm -u8` or one of the fancy GNOME / KDE terms which also support unicode. What does `env \| grep LANG` say? Note, BTW, that as far as perl is concerned, this only incidentally has to do with keyboard input, since `myprogram` is getting its data in `@ARGV`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Character Encoding of Keyboard Input by fizbin (Chaplain) on Mar 02, 2005 at 19:03 UTC
Yes, the answer is "it depends" - this issue is perhaps best dealt with by looking at this recent post, and its replies: 433998. `-- @/=map{[/./g]}qw/.h_nJ Xapou cets krht ele_ r_ra/; map{y/X_/\n /;print}map{pop@$_}@/for@/` [download]	[reply] [d/l]