"Unprintable" 8-bit characters

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:27:16 -0400
Daniel Staal <DStaal at usa.net> wrote:

> --As of November 8, 2011 7:58:04 PM -0600, Conrad J. Sabatier is
> alleged to have said:
> 
> > So, what would be the safest bet as far as the most "universal"
> > representation for these characters?  Something I've long wondered
> > about when I've e-mailed people and copied/pasted these characters
> > (are they really seeing what I'm seeing?).  :-)
> 
> --As for the rest, it is mine.
> 
> These days, the safest bet is UTF-8, or some other Unicode character
> set, in something that can convey what character set it is in.
> (Email can, depending on the mail client.)
> 
> Not that Unicode is universal yet, but it designed to be (and is, 
> generally) a solution to the 'multiple character encodings' problem.
> (By, of course, defining a new encoding.)  It has a decent amount of
> traction, and in a decade or so - once other options have been firmly
> depreciated - I'd expect we could start discussing whether to switch
> ls to using it by default.  ;)
> 
> All this is of course if you *must* go beyond 7-bit ASCII.  (Which
> all forms of Unicode is designed to be a strict superset of.)

That sounds sane and sensible.  :-)

I've adjusted my environment to include:

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

And also adjusted my console configuration to display these characters:

font8x14="iso-8x14"
font8x16="iso-8x16"
font8x8="iso-8x8"

And, last but not least, aliased "ls" to ensure these characters will
actually be displayed:

alias ls='ls -Fw'

Looking good here now:

conrads:~$ cd "Music/Progressive Rock/Yes/The Yes Album"
conrads:~/Music/Progressive Rock/Yes/The Yes Album$ ls *03*
Yes - The Yes Album - 03 - Starship Trooper: a. Life Seeker - b.
Disillusion - c. Würm.mp3

Many thanks to everyone for all the very helpful, useful information.

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier
conrads at cox.net