German umlauts and co

[A. Pagaltzis]

Hi Marc and everyone,

I'm having trouble understanding how to make urxvt produce
something sensible when I enter umlauts. I can see that what's
happening is that the Unicode codepoint is being sent as an
escape sequence à la ^[[0;f6A in the case of an ö.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a single application
under the sun which interprets this correctly. With xterm, I had
no problem having it emit 8-bit latin1 characters, which worked
fine enough. (I'm open to suggestions, however, even though when
I tried switching to an UTF-8 locale I had so much trouble I gave
up soon.)

The manpage says urxvt respects the locale instead of providing
an application-specific mechanism for configuration, but it's not
clear to me how to make things work. I currently have LANG and
LC_ALL set to "C" (is that why I get Unicode escape sequences
rather than 8-bit chars?), but setting this to anything else only
elicits the message

    urxvt: default locale unavailable, check LC_* and LANG variables. Continuing.

without any other effect. I don't understand what's going on
here, since all the locales I tried (variations on ``de_DE'') are
listed by ``locale -a''.

Did I miss some obvious hint in the documentation?

Any help unborking this would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle
"Like punning, programming is a play on words."
  -- Alan J. Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming"