How to set correct locale for external programs ?

["D Bera" <dbera web gmail com>]

Hey folks,
    I am not too familiar with non english, non UTF8 locales, so I
need some help in figuring out some details. For a lot of file types,
beagle runs an external program on the file and reads its output and
then indexes it. E.g. for external filter, for pdf files (output of
pdftotext) etc.

    Now, beagle expects to read UTF8 encoded characters. Is there any
way to ensure this. We earlier dealt with a locale related bug
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509487 by running the
external program with LANG=C. Though it seemed to fix the problem
then, it created other problems. And in retrospect, LANG=C does not
seem right for files which could output multibyte UTF8 characters.

    So if you have experience with these things before, please suggest
if there is environment variable that could be set to ensure that the
output is in UTF8. I guess we should let the "language" remain what it
is because the user expects the content of the file to be in his/her
default language.

Any help is deeply appreciated. Thanks,

- dBera

-- 
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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user