(Possible) inconsistent behavior of grep and less

Question

I have a utf-8 file containing some Turkish text inside. (My system is MacOSX)

$ file -I foo.merge
$foo.merge: text/plain; charset=utf-8

When I try to see some Turkish specific characters by using grep, there is no problem:

$ grep 'Emiroğlu' foo.merge
EMİROĞLU    Emiroğlu+Noun+A3sg+Pnon+Nom Emiroğlu+Noun+Prop+Noun+A3sg+P3sg+Nom   Emiroğlu+Noun+Prop+Noun+A3sg+Pnon+Nom   NOTFOUND

I can also see the file by using less command without any problem.

However if I try to do the following, the Turkish characters are not seen properly:

$ grep 'Emir' foo.merge | less
EMİROĞLU        ESC[1;35;40mESC[KEmirESC[mESC[Koğlu+Noun+A3sg+Pnon+Nom  ESC[1;35;40mESC[KEmirESC[mESC[Koğlu+Noun+Prop+Noun+A3sg+P3sg+Nom        ESC[1;35;40mESC[KEmirESC[mESC[Koğlu+Noun+Prop+Noun+A3sg+Pnon+Nom        NOTFOUND

Or the following also doesn't work:

$grep 'Emir' foo.merge > foo2.out
$less foo2.out

What could be the problem? Here is some additional information:

$ locale
LANG="en_US.utf-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.utf-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.utf-8"

Answer 1

The Turkish characters look fine. However grep has inserted colour codes into the output.

Choices:

• add option --color=never to grep (to remove colour).
• add option -R to less (to tell less to interpret ASCII colour codes).