# Displaying Polish characters



## balanga (Aug 24, 2018)

I'm trying to tidy up some MP3 files  of Polish songs but the filenames do not display properly, for example, I have something like this:-

```
(Perfect) Nie p??acz Ewka.mp3
01 wyjd?? na drog??.mp3
02. TILT - Rzeka Mi??o??ci- morze rado??ci.mp3
04.Przypowie????.mp3
06 - Gdynia noc??.mp3
07 - Pod Bud?? - W??dr??wka.mp3
09 - Lech Janerka - Wyobra???? Sobie.mp3
09 Jopek & Malenczuk - Tam- gdzie rosn?? dzikie r????e.mp3
09 Rastaman Nie K??amie.mp3
```

Can I display these with a Polish character set?


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## aragats (Aug 24, 2018)

What's your $LANG? Is it "*en_GB.UTF-8*" or similar with UTF-8?
If yes, those files have older (before-Unicode) encoding. It could be e.g. Windows-1250 or ISO 8859-2.
You can try:
	
	



```
ls | iconv -f CP1250 -t UTF8
   or
ls | iconv -f ISO-8859-2 -t UTF8
```


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## balanga (Aug 24, 2018)

aragats said:


> What's your $LANG?
> 
> 
> > root@FreeBSD:~# echo $LANG
> > LANG: Undefined variable.


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## aragats (Aug 24, 2018)

So, try setting it to a UTF-8, see the list of locales in /usr/share/locale/, chose one corresponding to your country.
Are you in a console or X? In console you may need loading the corresponding font.


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## balanga (Aug 24, 2018)

aragats said:


> So, try setting it to a UTF-8, see the list of locales in /usr/share/locale/, chose one corresponding to your country.
> Are you in a console or X? In console you may need loading the corresponding font.



I'm in the UK, but I want to display Polish characters (at least temporarily) so should I use en_GB.UTF-8 or pl_PL.UTF-8.

I can be in a console or X. Not sure which font I would need to load in a console...


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## aragats (Aug 24, 2018)

Why you don't want to try? In X you don't need a special font. Just set LANG to *en_GB.UTF-8* and see if those characters are displayed correctly.
If not, you probably have to convert them with `iconv` as I wrote above.


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## balanga (Aug 25, 2018)

Thanks for the help. I did try iconv but it didn't format properly. Maybe try again tomorrow...  brain going into standby mode


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## chrbr (Aug 27, 2018)

Dear balanga,
may be you like to have a look at /etc/login.conf. And do not forget to run `cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf` after modifications. Then changes are effective with the next log in.


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