[GRASS-dev] Re: [GRASS-stats] Sys.setlocale for GRASS6.4

[Markus Neteler]

(cc grass-dev)

@grass-dev: There are encoding issues with --interface-description
   which states UTF-8 also then the actual language encoding is different:

2009/9/4 Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no>:
> OK, don't worry about that. I'll try to send an updated spgrass6 when I have
> adequate net access. The problem is that GRASS writes UTF-8 as the encoding
> into the XML header from --nterface-description, but the French translations
> seem (on my XP machine) to be in latin1, that is the 0x.. spell eacute
> (\'{e}) in latex, then "fin" from "défine...", the first non-ASCII string in
> the output for g.region.
>
> The fix is to insert "latin1" into the header, so I've updated the package
> to allow the user to do this from within R

This gave me another idea to check the .po files in GRASS 6.4:

grep charset locale/po/grass*_fr.po
locale/po/grasslibs_fr.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n"
locale/po/grassmods_fr.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n"
locale/po/grasstcl_fr.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
locale/po/grasswxpy_fr.po:"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"

Apparently the translators mixed several charsets instead of using one,
this is valid for various languages supported in GRASS.

@grass-dev: Should we harmonize the encodings to UTF-8 for all/subset
  of languages? If yes, how? With iconv?

@grass-stats: perhaps we need to do our homework first and fix the mess
  if it is a mess...

Markus