I use mailx 12.5 as my email client with a command line. I'm having trouble with some characters in the message. For example, I have a email with a subject line (raw): Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?_RE:_Retiree=e2=80=99s_Dinner?=

If in .mailrc I have, "set ttycharset=ISO-8859-1", the subject is rendered, "RE: Retiree???s Dinner".

If in .mailrc I have, "set ttycharset=UTF-8", the subject is rendered, "RE: Retireeâs Dinner".

I don't seem to be able to show this as an apostrophe!

Note that the UTF-8 code for the right-apostrophe is e28099. The html code (not sure what codeset that is) for â is #224 or 0xe2. So it appears that when the mailx ttycharset is set to UTF-8 it is rendering only the first byte of the 028099 sequence.

It doesn't seem to matter what I have my locale set to.

This may not be mailx's fault. When I have my locale set to en_US.UTF-8 and do 'man mailx' (any manpage), I have what should be bulleted paragrahps:
Which gets rendered:
hex-dumping the man page shows the bullet as 0xc2b7 which is the UTF-8 codes for 'middle-dot'. However, my rendering is · which are the html codes c2 and b7 which are 'circumflex accent' (c2) and 'middle dot' (b7) respectively. So, it appears that my console is rendering these bytes separately, not as multi-byte sequences.

Ideas?

OK, I figured it out! I have to remember that command line is not necessarily the same as console. I get to the command line via KDE konsole. When I thought to check the character encoding, I saw that it was set to ISO-8859-1. When I changed that to UTF-8, all characters started showing correctly on my screen!