UTF-8 Characters in Byobu Screen Status Line

byobugnu-screenunicode

I'm running Byobu with Screen backend. I have a custom status script that wget's an RSS feed and shows the latest headline in it. If there are non-ASCII characters, they are not printed correctly. I've tried everything I could find Googling for properly enabling UTF-8 in Screen – all to no avail. I put together the sample script below that will demonstrate the problem. Does anyone know what I need to do to get Byobu/Screen displaying this correctly in the status line?

#!/bin/bash
SAMPLE=$(wget -q -O- "http://cnnespanol.cnn.com" | grep '<title>' | sed 's|.*<title>\(.*\)</title>|\1|' | head -n 1)
COLOR="= kr"
printf "\005{-}\005{$COLOR}$SAMPLE\005{-}\005{bw}"
echo

That script displays this text:

CNN en Español: Ultimas Noticias de Estados Unidos, Latinoamérica y el Mundo, Opinión y

Versions I am running:

  • Linux: Mint 14.1 w/ Cinnamon
  • byobu version 5.21
  • Screen version 4.00.03jw4 (FAU) 2-May-06

Best Answer

Unfortunately, GNU Screen is unable to cleanly support UTF8 in the status bar. This was one of several reasons why I added the Tmux backend support to Byobu.

Full disclosure: I'm the author and maintainer of Byobu.

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