@immibis Yes - nice - I couldn't see how that worked right away.

This assumes an UTF-8 locale. You should include the code to set up such a locale.

@FUZxxl The default locale is en_US.UTF-8 on my default install of Ubuntu. Do you really think it's necessary to add code to restate this explicitly? Perhaps a meta question...

@DigitalTrauma My default locale is de_DE@euro which uses ISO 8859-15. Yes, it's necessary in my opinion.

@FUZxxl What distro are you using? Is de_DE@euro the default locale set at install time? I claim that en_US.UTF-8 is the default locale set at install time for Ubuntu (very "mainstream" distro). Likely this default is same for the significant majority of other "mainstream" distros.

@DigitalTrauma Actually, Ubuntu asks you which locale to set at install time. The default locale is C or POSIX according to IEEE 1003.1 and that one doesn't do Unicode.

@FUZxxl Are you sure about the "doesn't do Unicode" part? I've done many default Ubuntu installs (mostly VMs) and never explicitly changed locale at install time. Unicode (UTF-8) has always just worked out of the box. Output from locale is all LC_*="en_US.UTF-8"

@DigitalTrauma It's a checkbox during the text install and the very first question (language) in a GUI install. Easy to miss or ignore.

But if you leave all the defaults, you should end up with en_US.UTF-8

I'm trying it now

I even set location to be Berlin...

but I didn't change the default language option of US english

If you leave language to English that is

anyway, if you leave everything at default, you can't even complete the installation as you need to type a user name.

which is the deafult

you are grasping at straws here

I disagree

it's the same situation with the perl -e switch which also counts as an extra character.

username and password must be set - there are no default values for these fields

so you have to deviate from the default somewhere.

whereas the default option is US English

you have to choose something else if you want something else

Okay. I accept your reasoning if you change the language to “Ubuntu <version>, command line utilities«

or something like that

I still don't like it

pretty sure its the same for Centos

depends on how you install centos

probably most of the other "big" distroes

probably makes a good meta question

certainly country-specific distros will have different defaults

anyway, the only standard I know of mentions C as the default locale (and that's in fact what FreeBSD sets as the default)

yes - I'm drafting up a meta question now

FWIW, I'd usually be the last person to argue for "American Exceptionalism" ;-)

except if it makes you win a challenge of course

haha

Here is the meta-question meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/7881/…

Please comment or edit if you think I've written this to be too biased towards my point of view

and of course please add an answer

I put this right at the top of my answer:

> As discussed here, this answer becomes invalid if an encoding other than UTF-8 is used.

is that ok?

Yes. As of now, I'm adding some resolution approaches so people have choice. Please do so, too.

ok

I'm abstaining from voting on this

Gotto go offline now

ttyl

see you