read other encoding file
 

I am trying to read a Chinese file in Fedora 7. The file was encoded with UTF-16LE, viewable in XP machine called chinese16.txt. My Window XP has codepage 437. Then, using Notepad i saved the file as "save as UTF-8" and name it as chinese8.txt.

After copy the file to the Linux machine, where the default locale is en_US.utf8 (according to the "$ locale" command.

I searched on the web and tried changing the locale with localedef command to change the locale to zh_CN.UTF-8, and export LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8.

when trying to view the utf8 file, chinese8.txt, I could not see any content in that file. I am not sure what i did incorrectly.

is there any expert in this area who can help?

Can you copy the original file? Look at "file chinese16.txt" and see if the encoding is detected.
There is a program called iconv that may be able to convert the file to utf8 or utf16. Then see if you can read it in kate or another editor.

yes. I also use iconv to convert the file. The file contain English word and Chinese words. After converting them to UTF-8, I can see only English word, but the Chinese characters are not viewable (blank)

Stick with the orginal chinese16.txt file - UTF-16 would be a common encoding of Unicode under Windows.

Iconv knows of this and will (should be able to) convert this to the Unix world UTF-8 encoding.

If you call inconv -l you'll see all the utf-variants listed, try to convert directly from the orginal to utf-8.

And the locale setting you chose (LANG) actually just sets things to show error messages and menus and things like that in chinese - you'll need "show me chinese characters" which would be LC_CTYPE. (character type). LC_COLLATE affects sorting but I don't know if this really does chinese dictionary sorting with radicals and strokes counted and so on.

So, export LC_CTYPE to the proper locale setting you've got available (locale -a) - and I'm not sure wether or not this is case-sensitive or not.

If I view this UTF-8 file in window, the content is
Application=先生

This is what I did

$ localedef -c -i zh_CN -f UTF-8 zh_CN.UTF-8
$ export LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
$ locale
LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Viewing in Linux using $ more, and $ vi, I got blank space for the Chinese characters
Application=