Joe Kesselman wrote:
> santiago@p... wrote:
>> How do russian, polish or chinese people write
>> their (raw) XML?
> 
> Sometimes by specifying an encoding that matches the keyboard they're 
> using (the XML declaration says which encoding a given file is written 
> in). Sometimes by converting it from their native encoding to UTF8 
> before publishing.

Yes, that's the way we type our Umlauts and
other strange characters in German. At the shell
level, I can find out which encoding is used by
my operating system:

locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

The "locale" command is a standard POSIX command.
Read the newgroup gnu.utils.bug. You will find that
problems with locale cause many "bug reports" there
which are not bugs, but locale-specific details.

And now some weird characters to disturb your emailer:
äÄöÖüÜ and the best is ß