Displaying 'umlaut' character

My aim is to display the ‘special’ (NON-Ascii) German character/ diacritic umlaut or diaresis correctly on a browser. The browser calls a cgi perl-script which resides on a linux server. The browser which calls the perl-script displays Vietnamese characters correctly (but not the umlaut) without any special setting. The script sets NLS_LANG variable to AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8 and uses utf8 module, but that’s about it.

$ENV{'NLS_LANG'}='AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8';     Works for Vietnamese characters, but not with umlaut (ö).

But even before we get to a perl-script, perhaps the LC_CTYPE env variable needs to be set correctly. From my windows laptop, if I access Oracle through Oracle Query Server, I can see the umlaut. But if I open a linux-window, initiate an sqlplus session, and run the same SQL, I do not see the umlaut correctly. I have tried a few values for the env variable LC_CTYPE (like iso_8859_1, en_US, en_US.iso88591), but with no luck. The surprising thing is that ‘umalut’ is a muck-known alphabet, Vietnamese alphabets are lessknown.  Yet the Vietnamese characters are being displayed correctly.

What settings should I use in a perl-script or for a linux-window to see the umlaut correctly? Please advise. Received on Tue Sep 21 2010 - 23:50:31 CDT