Problem

Accented characters in an HTML file, displayed through a COBOL program are not displaying correctly.

Resolution

The problem is that although the characters look fine in Ultra Edit or VI editor on UNIX, they are being mis-interpreted due to an incorrect setting of LANG (locale) environment variable.

Using the locale command, displayed the following environment variables..
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

As the accented characters are not UTF-8, there will always be display issues if the program is run with UTF8 locale.

The characters are displayed correctly as long as any xterm’s locale is set to iso88591 or iso885915  before you compile and run the program.

Use the command

export LANG=en_US.iso88591 or export LANG=en_US.iso885915

to set the correct locale.

Using the locale command, displayed the following environment variables..

LANG=en_US.iso88591
LC_CTYPE="en_US.iso88591"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.iso88591"
LC_TIME="en_US.iso88591"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.iso88591"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.iso88591"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.iso88591"
LC_PAPER="en_US.iso88591"
LC_NAME="en_US.iso88591"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.iso88591"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.iso88591"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.iso88591"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.iso88591"
LC_ALL=

or

LANG=en_US.iso885915
LC_CTYPE="en_US.iso885915"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.iso885915"
LC_TIME="en_US.iso885915"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.iso885915"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.iso885915"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.iso885915"
LC_PAPER="en_US.iso885915"
LC_NAME="en_US.iso885915"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.iso885915"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.iso885915"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.iso885915"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.iso885915"
LC_ALL=

These values are case sensitive.

Incident#3115402