Re: Cygwin 2.6.0: unreadable UTF-8 in Windows console

[Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSw.ab.ca>]

On 2016-09-30 22:34, Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2016-09-30 20:13, Ivan Vanyushkin wrote:
>> Something has changed in version 2.6.0, and now UTF-8 text can't be displayed in Windows console (cmd).
>> 1. Create a file "test.txt" with non-ASCII text in UTF-8 encoding.
>> 2. Run "cmd".
>> 3. Run:
>> C:\Cygwin\bin\cat test.txt
>> â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’ â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’ â–’â–’â–’â–’ â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’ 8000 â–’â–’. â–’â–’â–’â–’ â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’ â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’â–’.
>> Non-ASCII text is not readable. Older Cygwin 2.5.2 has no such issue.
>> C:\Cygwin\bin\uname -a
>> CYGWIN_NT-10.0 PCName 2.6.0(0.304/5/3) 2016-08-31 14:32 x86_64 Cygwin
>> C:\Cygwin\bin\locale
>> LANG=
>> LC_CTYPE="C.UTF-8"
>> LC_NUMERIC="C.UTF-8"
>> LC_TIME="C.UTF-8"
>> LC_COLLATE="C.UTF-8"
>> LC_MONETARY="C.UTF-8"
>> LC_MESSAGES="C.UTF-8"
>> LC_ALL=
>> Same issue with any other commands like "grep", or with utilities built and run under Cygwin 2.6.0.
>> Same issue in other Windows consoles, like ConEmu or FAR Manager.
>> If I change Windows console encoding to UTF-8 (run: "chcp 65001"), file can be correctly displayed natively
>> (run: "type test.txt"), but Cygwin "cat" still has the same issue.
>> How should I display UTF-8 now?
>
> No problems here - same setup.
> Don't have files containing UTF-8 specials handy, but do have with Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) specials,
> convertable to UTF-8.
> Stripped common ASCII-only lines from output below.
> Default email encoding is Unicode (hopefully UTF-8) not Western (presumably Latin1), so should render accurately.
>
> $ uname -srvmo
> CYGWIN_NT-10.0 2.6.0(0.304/5/3) 2016-08-31 14:32 x86_64 Cygwin
> $ locale
> LANG=C.UTF-8
> LC_CTYPE="C.UTF-8"
> LC_NUMERIC="C.UTF-8"
> LC_TIME="C.UTF-8"
> LC_COLLATE="C.UTF-8"
> LC_MONETARY="C.UTF-8"
> LC_MESSAGES="C.UTF-8"
> LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
> $ egrep -a 'Deg|LF' latin1.txt # -a needed to override binary assumption - garbled characters
> DegN='â–’N'
> DegW='â–’W'
> Y2LF='%sâ–’%s %s %s'
> Y2LLF='|â–’%.0s|'
> LF='|â–’'.YFP.'|'
> $ iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 latin1.txt | egrep 'Deg|LF' # good utf-8 characters
> DegN='°N'
> DegW='°W'
> Y2LF='%s±%s %s %s'
> Y2LLF='|±%.0s|'
> LF='|±'.YFP.'|'

Sorry - this was mintty - you used cmd!
Saw similar problems you had until I set LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 (and LANG for consistency, but doesn't really matter) and chcp 65001.
Then type and Cygwin commands produce the same output.
Without CP65001 (and a Unicode console font mapping most characters - I use DejaVu Sans Mono everywhere I can) there may be no valid encoding for UTF-8 special characters in your default console CP (437 for US, 850 for non-US, others for localized versions).
Unfortunately then less displays spaces as squares, so you may have to set PAGER=more for readability.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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