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I am using a server (by ssh) and as I am French I would like to be able to use characters such as "à", "ç" and "é". However they simply can't be printed in the standard output, whether when I press the corresponding key on my keyboard (it simply ignores the key), or when I run a script supposed to print them. For example a Python script will raise:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 1-3: ordinal not in range(128)

Following some advices I looked at the locale:

$ locale
LANG=C
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_PAPER="C"
LC_NAME="C"
LC_ADDRESS="C"
LC_TELEPHONE="C"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=

So I opened the /etc/default/locale file, and changed it from: 

LANG="C"

to

LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8

It still doesn't work, but a call to locale now tells me:

$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Any ideas how I could fix this ?

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6
  • hmm... strange that LANGUAGE is unset. Have you installed French? Try running sudo update-locale LANGUAGE=fr_FR:fr?
    – Zanna ♦
    Oct 12, 2016 at 8:56
  • it doesn't seem to change anything.
    – Anne Aunyme
    Oct 12, 2016 at 9:08
  • Actually it did, but only after I started a nex ssh session. Should I do that AND manually edit /usr/default/locale ? (presently I reverted this back to initial state)
    – Anne Aunyme
    Oct 12, 2016 at 9:42
  • no, update-locale updates /etc/default/locale for you (that's what it's supposed to do anyway. You can edit it yourself instead though.)
    – Zanna ♦
    Oct 12, 2016 at 9:44
  • Ok, I solved the problem by typing: LANGUAGE=fr_FR.UTF-8, LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 and the problem seems to be fixed. @FlorianDiesch: your link seems to be a similar problem but not exactly the same.
    – Anne Aunyme
    Oct 12, 2016 at 12:19

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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You need to get rid of those locale errors too by generating the fr_FR.UTF-8 locale:

sudo locale-gen fr_FR.UTF-8
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  • Actually I didn't seem to need that. What is it supposed to do? Modify /etc/default/locale ? Something else ?
    – Anne Aunyme
    Oct 13, 2016 at 7:42
  • @AnneAunyme: As I said, it generates the locale which you tells the system in /etc/default/locale to use. Setting LANGUAGE may be sufficient for certain aspects of GNU compatible programs, but you really should get rid of those error messages when running the locale command.
    – Gunnar Hjalmarsson
    Oct 13, 2016 at 8:27
  • Those errors only occurred when I manually modified the file. For now (after reverting back to the initial file and applying my answer), everything seems to be fine.
    – Anne Aunyme
    Oct 13, 2016 at 8:42
  • @AnneAunyme: That sounds odd, but ok, in that case all is well. :)
    – Gunnar Hjalmarsson
    Oct 13, 2016 at 8:51
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The problem was solved by the following commands:

sudo update-locale LANGUAGE=fr_FR.UTF-8
sudo update-locale LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
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