strange character "â" in cmake generated makefile errors

Question

Terrible title, sorry. I used cmake to generate a makefile and I specified g++ as the C++ compiler and when I run the generated makefile using make or gmake I get all these compile errors and all my symbols have trailing â's on them. Any thoughts on what might be behind these mysterious â's?

Answer 1

You probably have the LANG environmental variable setup incorrectly. Try setting it to C or en_US.

If using bash something like export LANG=C or export LANG=en_US should solve your problem.

Answer 2

They're Unicode quote marks, LEFT and RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, which are encoded in UTF-8 as "\xE2\x80\x98" and "\xE2\x80\x99". And '\xE2' in Latin-1 is 'â'.

So your choices are to figure out why your terminal is not interpreting UTF-8 correctly, or to tell g++ not to generate them. The latter is done by setting LANG=C or so, as the_void noted, which will cause the compiler to emit ordinary ASCII quote marks instead.