Is there any convenient way to modify the terminal's encoding?

[stdmkmehp]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

When I use ssh to connect to remote server in terminal, it is frequent to switch encoding between gbk and utf-8. But it seams that there is no way to do it. This matter is causing me a lot of distress. Plz help me!

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

[lhecker]

I'd love to help but can you please write more about what you mean? Ideas:

• Are you trying to remotely connect to a Windows or Linux system?
• How are you trying to switch the encoding?
• What exactly breaks?
• Can you give us steps so that we can reproduce your issue?

[stdmkmehp]

I'm try to remotely connect to a Linux system which has env LC_ALL=C. When I do shell cmd with "cat file", the terminal shows garbled characters. The file is encoded with gbk，but it seams that terminal shows as utf-8.
To reproduce the issue, you can cat file_enc_with_gbk.txt. On my terminal, it comes with

Obviously it is not what i want.

I have used Xshell before, which can provide a dropdown menu to switch the terminal's encoding. If the file is encode with gbk, I just need switch the terminal's encoding to gbk. If the file is encode with utf-8, I just need switch the terminal's encoding to utf-8. Buf the Windows terminal seems take a default encoding utf-8, and do not support to switch.

file_enc_with_gbk.txt

[lhecker]

I'm try to remotely connect to a Linux system which has env LC_ALL=C.

LC_ALL=C in practice tells your system that you want to use ASCII. At a minimum, I would recommend setting it to zh_CN.UTF-8 if possible, or some other variant, to get Unicode support. Of course there's also zh_CN.GBK if you really need GBK encoding anywhere, but I'd recommend against using GKB long term, because it's not Unicode which makes exchanging text difficult.

Buf the Windows terminal seems take a default encoding utf-8, and do not support to switch.

Not quite. You're right in that we don't support switching the encoding (codepage) via a setting. #15678 tracks this feature request. I think it makes sense for us to have such a setting, because Gnome Terminal, Apple's Terminal, and many others got it as well.

However, I believe your issue is because Windows' OpenSSH doesn't support switching the encoding. See here: PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH#1855 (comment) I can't imagine that this is an inherent limitation and I'm pretty sure support for other encodings could be added to OpenSSH. However, such work doesn't seem to be currently planned.