Why does gcc have "â" in all its error messages?

Question

For some reason, my installation of gcc seems to be printing an "a with a carat" character in place of all %s's in its error messages, e.g.,

test.c:4: error: expected â, â, â, â or â before â token

Has anyone else seen this before? (Needless to say, it's difficult to Google for.)

(This is on Ubuntu 8.10)

Edit: The guy at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=252832 says to set LC_MESSAGES=en_US but that doesn't do anything for me.

Answer 1

What is your LANG-Settings (call "export" on a bash in a terminal)? Try setting the Lang to a correct value like

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

using

declare -x LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

This seems to be a charset-problem, so perhaps you want to double-check using the right one.

Answer 2

Seems like madness to me, but I just wanted to put in that you may be able to Google for it more easily by calling the ^ a circumflex, which is what it's usually called when used as an accent.

Answer 3

Aha! The problem was that I have LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and was using xterm. Apparently, that's no good. By setting LANG=C or LANG=en_US, everything's great now.