# vi displays international characters in hex, not clear text



## riddle (Oct 9, 2003)

Vi on my 10.2.8 box displays international characters in double-wide hex rather than as the standard Roman characters with diacritics that I expect.

That is, the characters "&eacute; &ccedil; and &uuml;" (if you can't read those, they are e-acute, c-cedilla and u-umlaut) would be displayed in vi as:

     \xc3\xa9 \xc3\xa7 \xc3\xbc

Other applications don't mess with my mind like this: pico and the shell command line display the accented characters as expected.

My Terminal window settings are what the tutorials all recommend:

    Display->Encoding is Unicode (UTF-8)

    Emulation->"Escape 8-bit chars with Ctrl-V" is checked

This is driving me crazy!  Am I missing some way to tell vi that I'm using Unicode?


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## ex2bot (Oct 9, 2003)

This message was moved from OS X Sys. and Software forum.

Doug


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## Eckhart (Oct 11, 2003)

I don't think it'll help telling you that what you're seeing is most likely octal and not hex 

Give "vim" a try! It has far more startup options on i18n and similar issues (plus more documentation).

I always found localization a bit hard in MacOSX compared to FreeBSD or Linux, anyways. A while ago we were hard-linking font maps to get an international encoding in X11.


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## riddle (Oct 11, 2003)

Thanks, but I need a real solution.  I like vim but even if I install it on my machine, I have the same problem when I ssh into a Unix box elsewhere and run vi there.


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## scruffy (Oct 11, 2003)

the manpage for vi looks like it just doesn't do more than plain old ascii.  There's an option to show unknown characters as octal instead of hex, but that's about it...


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