How to Fix Special Characters as Accents, Tildes, and Other Special Characters in Your Terminal

Encountering garbled text, unexpected symbols, or question marks in your terminal can be frustrating. These character display issues often arise from encoding mismatches when dealing with multilingual content or different systems. This post will guide you on how to troubleshoot these problems using ‘chcp 65001’ for UTF-8 compatibility, ensuring your work in terminals across Windows, macOS, and Linux runs smoothly.

Long Story Short: everything you see on your computer screen starts as binary data, which needs to be correctly interpreted to appear as the characters you expect. Mismatches in this encoding process lead to the jumbled text often seen when your system isn’t properly configured.

UTF-8: The Hero of Encoding

UTF-8 is a hero in the world of encoding for several reasons, because it supports nearly every language and script in the world, ensuring your content is accessible globally, it’s variable-length nature optimizes space, which makes it efficient without sacrificing functionality and it’s the standard across most platforms, from operating systems to web browsers, ensuring broad compatibility.

Simplifying UTF-8 on Windows

The chcp command in Command Prompt or PowerShell is your go-to tool for managing character encoding issues on Windows. Here’s how you can use it step-by-step:

On Command Prompt:

1. Open Command Prompt.
2. Type chcp to view the current code page.
3. To switch to UTF-8, type chcp 65001.

On PowerShell:

1. Open PowerShell.
2. Check your current encoding with [Console]::OutputEncoding.
3. If it’s not UTF-8, type [Console]::OutputEncoding = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.
4. Repeat the step 2 to ensure it’s set to UTF-8 now.

Ensuring UTF-8 on macOS and Linux

Most terminals on macOS and Linux default to UTF-8, but verifying and setting it manually is straightforward:

Bash Shell (commonly on macOS and Linux):

1. Open your terminal.
2. Type echo $LANG to display the current locale. If it’s not UTF-8, continue to the next step.
3. Edit your shell profile by typing nano ~/.bash_profile or nano ~/.bashrc.
4. Add export LANG="en_US.UTF-8" to the file.
5. Save and exit the editor (Ctrl-X, Y, Enter).
6. Apply the changes by typing source ~/.bash_profile or source ~/.bashrc.

Zsh Shell (common on newer macOS installations):

1. Open your terminal.
2. Type echo $LANG to check the current locale setting.
3. Edit your .zshrc file by typing nano ~/.zshrc.
4. Add export LANG="en_US.UTF-8" to the file.
5. Save and exit the editor.
6. Refresh your shell settings by typing source ~/.zshrc.

Practical Tips and Troubleshooting

Adopting UTF-8 and adjusting your terminal settings can facilitate the accurate display of diverse scripts in text files and source code, help avoid conflicts in Git, especially with non-ASCII characters in commit messages or filenames and enhance the reliability of command-line tools and scripts.

Remember, some older applications might struggle with UTF-8, and not all fonts fully support every character in this encoding. It’s also worth noting that default code pages can vary by system settings and regional configurations.

Understanding and implementing the right character encoding settings can save you from many headaches and keep your development environment efficient and globally compatible. If you are a Developer and want to go deeper and want to understand more, you can go to the The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).