charset

Problem

I had a problem with Mutt messing up the screen when displaying special characters (see this example).

The solution was to set charset="utf-8" in my .muttrc, then ensure that my terminal program had a similar setting (for putty, it is (change settings -> Window -> Translation; Received data assumed to be in which character set: UTF-8)

Figuring out what locale and charset to use:

Just run /usr/bin/locale in your terminal. The key value is LC_CTYPE, which specifies characters and case conversion.

# locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
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_US.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=

Sites discussing charsets:

Thorough, not so quick:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

Quick, not so thorough:

http://www.madboa.com/geek/utf8/