# Multibyte characters in curses

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/multibyte-characters-in-curses/122894>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [December 12, 2007, 7:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/multibyte-characters-in-curses/122894 "2007-12-12T19:53:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Michal\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@Michal\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Michal_S)\
**Post date:** [December 12, 2007, 7:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/multibyte-characters-in-curses/122894/1 "2007-12-12T19:53:12Z")

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Hello

Am I the only one who wishes this worked?

Or does it work for everybody and it’s broken only for me?

I tried to look at a ncurses sample program, and made a simple patch  
that makes utf-8 sort of work with ncursesw provided that you run in  
utf-8 locale. Probably works on Linux/OS X,…  
The curses on Windows are different.

Thanks

Michal

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**Author:** ![Michal\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@Michal\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Michal_S)\
**Post date:** [December 18, 2007, 9:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/multibyte-characters-in-curses/122894/2 "2007-12-18T21:31:18Z")

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On 18/12/2007, Martin D. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> application also creates problems.

However, some libraries like ncurses rely on the locale to determine  
what characters are printable. It makes some sense to do that, it’s  
what the locale was designed for. And unless you set the locale  
ncurses won’t display anything outside of iso8859-1.

Thanks

Michal

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Michal\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@Michal\_S](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Michal_S)\
**Post date:** [December 18, 2007, 9:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/multibyte-characters-in-curses/122894/3 "2007-12-18T21:04:57Z")

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At 03:53 07/12/18, Michal S. wrote:

> The same patch applies to the curses extension in 1.9, and the patched  
> hello.rb then works as expected.  
> The only reference to setlocale appears to be in a comment in  
> time.rb. Perhaps ruby should start to care about locale?

Ruby definitely will start to care about locales, but calling  
setlocale may be the wrong thing to do. It would mean for example  
that all calls to strcasecmp in the Ruby code have to be carefully  
examined. For many programs, the idea of a single locale for an  
application also creates problems.

Regards, Martin.

#-#-# Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University  
#-#-# [http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp](http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp)[mailto:removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)