Using the charmap.alias file

The charmap.alias file can be used to map a system specific locale to a standard IANA locale.

The name of the character set defined within the LANG/LC_ALL environment variables can wary from system to system. For example, on a given platform, the ISO-8859-1 character set may be named "iso88591", while others platform will use "8859-1".

On UNIX™-like systems, installed locales can be listed with the locale -a command.

Example of locale configuration on Linux/Debian:

$ unset LANG
$ export LC_ALL=en_US.iso885915
$ locale
LANG=
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.iso885915"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.iso885915"
LC_TIME="en_US.iso885915"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.iso885915"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.iso885915"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.iso885915"
LC_PAPER="en_US.iso885915"
LC_NAME="en_US.iso885915"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.iso885915"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.iso885915"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.iso885915"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.iso885915"
LC_ALL=en_US.iso885915

$ locale charmap
ISO-8859-15

To communicate with other components like front-ends, or to identify the encoding of XML files, Genero programs must use a normalized name for character sets. This normalized name must follow the IANA specifications [RFC2978].

In order to convert the operating system specific locale codeset name to an IANA name, the runtime system uses the charmap.alias mapping file, located in $FGLDIR/etc. Add your operating system specific locale, if not listed in the charmap.alias file.

The charmap.alias file has the following syntax:

system-codeset-name  IANA-codeset-name
[...]

Comment lines can be added by using a # hash character at the beginning of the line.

Example of charmap.alias file:

# Linux
ISO_646.IRV:1983 ASCII
ANSI_X3.4-1968 ASCII
# macOS
US-ASCII ASCII
# IBM AIX
ISO8859-1 ISO-8859-1
ISO8859-2 ISO-8859-2
ISO8859-5 ISO-8859-5
ISO8859-6 ISO-8859-6
ISO8859-7 ISO-8859-7
ISO8859-8 ISO-8859-8
ISO8859-9 ISO-8859-9
ISO8859-15 ISO-8859-15
...