How do I change a shell scripts character encoding?

Question

I am using Gina Trapiani's excellent todo.sh to organize my todo-list. However being a dane, it would be nice if the script accepted special danish characters like ø and æ. I am an absolute UNIX-n00b, so it would be a great help if anybody could tell me how to fix this! :)

Accepted Answer

What does this command show?

```
locale
```

It should show something like this for you:

```
LC_CTYPE="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="da_DK.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
```

If not, you might try doing this before you run your script:

```
LANG=da_DK.UTF-8
```

You don't say what happens when you run the script and it encounters these characters. Are they in the todo file? Are they entered at a prompt? Is there an error message? Is something output in place of the expected output?

Try this and see what you get:

```
read -p "Enter some characters" string
echo "$string"
```

How do I change a shell scripts character encoding?

Solution

Problem