In OS X Lion, LANG is not set to UTF-8, how to fix it?

macos encoding utf-8 terminal
mamcx picture mamcx · Aug 23, 2011 · Viewed 126.4k times · Source

I try to setup postgress in OS X Lion, and find that is not correctly setup the LOCALE environment var.

This is what is set:

LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=

I expect something with UTF-8. This is a clean OS X Lion setup, with spanish language. I don't move anything.

I don't know how setup it to UTF-8.

In the terminal settings, is check UTF-8 and set LOCALE in open, despite that don't work.

Answer

wormintrude picture wormintrude · Nov 17, 2011

I noticed the exact same issue when logging onto servers running Red Hat from an OSX Lion machine.

Try adding or editing the ~/.profile file for it to correctly export your locale settings upon initiating a new session.

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8  
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

These two lines added to the file should suffice to set the locale [replace en_US for your desired locale, and check beforehand that it is indeed installed on your system (locale -a)].

After that, you can start a new session and check using locale:

$ locale

The following should be the output:

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"

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