I would like to determine if the user's locale uses UTF-8 encoding.
This seems a little bit ugly:
[[ $LANG =~ UTF-8$ ]] && echo "Uses UTF-8 encoding.."
is there a more general/portable way?
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On POSIX platforms, locale identifiers are defined similarly to the BCP 47 definition of language tags, but the locale variant modifier is defined differently, and the character encoding is included as a part of the identifier.
It is defined in this format: [language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]]. (For example, Australian English using the UTF-8 encoding is en_AU.UTF-8.)
However, if the codeset suffix is missing in the locale identifier, for example as in en_AG
(see this question), then the codeset is defined by a default setting for that locale, which could very well be UTF-8. As a result, the current encoding cannot be determined by looking at the LANG environment variable.
Further, the locale
command only shows the current values of the environment variables.. so it seems that that command cannot be used to determine the codeset either..
However, there is a Perl module I18N::Langinfo
, see also this question that seems to be a solution:
perl -MI18N::Langinfo=langinfo,CODESET -E 'say "Uses UTF-8 encoding .." if langinfo(CODESET()) eq "UTF-8"'
This Perl module is a wrapper for the C library function nl_langinfo.
locale charmap
."
There is charmap
attribute in the LC_CTYPE locale category that can be used for this:
locale charmap | grep -qi 'utf-\+8' && echo "Uses UTF-8 encoding.."
It is a bit more robust that parse the locale name.
(answer updated base on the Bluehorn suggestion, thanks!)
locale charmap
which will just return the character set of the current locale.
On POSIX system, you can use locale:
$ if (locale | grep -e 'utf8' -e 'UTF-8') >/dev/null 2>&1; then echo UTF8; fi
UTF8
To take care of the cases in which the locale string contains a lowercase utf8
substring, you can set bash
's nocasematch
option and make the dash optional:
shopt -s nocasematch
[[ $LANG =~ UTF-?8$ ]] && echo "Uses UTF-8 encoding.."
[ $LANG =~ UTF-8$ ]] && echo "Uses UTF-8 encoding.."
is ugly?)LANG
is not defined? What ifLANG
uses lower case lettersutf-8
, and so on..LC_CTYPE
,LC_ALL
orLANGUAGE
, or if the encoding name uses a variation on the suffix such asutf8
.