How to add Cyrillic in Ubuntu 18.04?

Question

I have already installed Russian keyboard layout.

In language support -> installed languages I already have Russian.

But when I open text file with Cyrillic I have encoding problems. This files was created in Windows earlier. With new files I don't have this problem.

Ïðîäâèíóòàÿ ìàìà

Ìàìà ñòðàòåã ñåìåéíûé íàø Åùå óñòðîèò íàì øàáàø Ìû ñ íåé íå óìðåì îò ñêóêè, Çà ýòî öåëóåì åé ðóêè.

UPD. I tried to specify Windows-1251 encoding manually while opening file and Cyrillic has shown correct. I don't have problem in files, which encoding was set as UTF-8.

Solution

Usually text files with Russian (Cyrillic) text are created in Windows with Windows-1251 (or CP-1251) encoding. Less often they use ISO 8859-5. While modern systems use UTF-8.

You can always check file encoding with file command:

$ file utf8.txt 
utf8.txt: UTF-8 Unicode text

To open files correctly and automatically you can use feature-rich text editor as kate.
Or specify encoding manually when you open file with gedit or other editor.

Comments

[N0rbert]

Did you tried to specify Windows-1251 encoding manually while opening file with Gedit? Did you try Kate editor?

[Eric Korolev]

@N0rbert I tried and Cyrillic has shown correct.

[David Foerster]

Possible duplicate of Opening a non-utf8 encoded text file

[Haggra]

file command may be showing the incorrect format. My files were shown as ISO-8859, although they were Windows-1251. That was the core of the problem, as well. You can use iconv command to convert the file formats. iconv -f Windows-1251 -t UTF-8 file_name worked in my case.