Cp437 Save

cp437

cp437 is a program to emulate an old-style "code page 437" / "IBM-PC" character set terminal on a modern terminal emulator that uses UTF-8 or similar.

It was written for the purpose of running the BitchX IRC client, which utilises CP437 line-drawing characters in its default theme and artwork. It should also be broadly useful for things like viewing CP437 "ANSI art", running nethack with the IBMgraphics option or running EPIC with scripts that use CP437 artwork.

Building

Just running "make" (or "gmake" on BSD systems) should build the cp437 binary.
You'll need iconv, which is provided by glibc on Linux but is provided by the libiconv port on FreeBSD. As yet I've not tested it on any operating systems other than those two, although it is reputed to work on OS X and OpenBSD too - feedback is welcome.

You can move the binary wherever you like - I suggest $HOME/bin.

Usage

Just run cp437 followed by the command and argument you want to run:

cp437 BitchX irc.efnet.org

You'll need to have your LANG or LC_CTYPE environment variable set up to match the character set used by your terminal emulator. This is often set by default but on some operating systems you may need to do some additional setup (for FreeBSD, see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/using-localization.html)