Cant echo extended ASCII characters to xsetroot -name

Question

Ok, I'll try to explain this without getting confused.
I'm using a font with custom glyphs to display little "icons" in my dwm status using xsetroot.
I got it to work, but I'd like to know what's going on.
The only way that I could get the glyphs into my script was to:
1. Open urxvt and type
echo -e '\xEF' #wifi status glyph
2. Highlight the resulting character
3. "Middle click it" into my editor for .xinitrc
For example, some of the .xinitrc code
wifi(){
if iwgetid > /dev/null
then echo -e "\x03ï\x01"
else echo -e "\x04ï\x01"
fi
xsetroot -name "`wifi`"
That 'i' thing, in most fonts, is ASCII pagecode 0xEF, my wifi status glyph.
What I don't understand is that if I simply make
then echo -e "\x03ï\x01"
read
then echo -e "\x03\xEF\x01"
the glyph will not show up.
A 7bit character such as 'E' will show up, however, if I make the line
then echo -e "\x03\x45\x01"
I tested to see if
echo -e '\xEF'
would show up in uxterm, and it didn't. However, I could "middle click" the character right into uxterm from urxvt.
What is going on and how can I code for the glyph in a non-unicode environment?
TL;DR: if I run the following code in uxterm it shows boxes, if I run it in urvxt it shows glyphs
echo -e `echo \\\x{{0..9},{a..f}}{{0..9},{a..f}}`
Last edited by Slax (2010-09-16 22:42:25)

Answer 1

Solved this a few days ago.
I had to set my locacle to ISO-8859-1 rather than Unicode, as Unicode will not print ASCII beyond 128.