If you have to deal with foreign languages and character sets (Cyrillic, Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji, etc) you need to have UTF support on your server. If you don’t already have it, here’s how you get it:
1. nano /etc/default/locale.gen and uncomment the line with en_US.UTF-8 (assuming your default language should be English)
2. locale-gen
3. edit /etc/profile and /etc/bash.bashrc and add the following: export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
When you next start a shell (exit, call bash manually, run sudo -s, whatever) you should then see UTF support available:
me@box:~$ locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 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=
And you’re done.
