In OS X Lion, LANG is not set to UTF-8, how to fix it?

if you have zsh installed you can also update ~/.zprofile with

if [[ -z "$LC_ALL" ]]; then
  export LC_ALL='en_US.UTF-8'
fi

and check the output using the locale cmd as show above

❯ locale                                                                                                                                           
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

I noticed the exact same issue when logging onto servers running Red Hat from an OSX Lion machine.

Try adding or editing the ~/.profile file for it to correctly export your locale settings upon initiating a new session.

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8  
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

These two lines added to the file should suffice to set the locale [replace en_US for your desired locale, and check beforehand that it is indeed installed on your system (locale -a)].

After that, you can start a new session and check using locale:

$ locale

The following should be the output:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"  
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"  
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"  
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"  
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"  
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"  
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"  
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"  

This is a headbreaker for a long time. I see now it's OSX.. i change it system-wide and it works perfect

When i add this the LANG in Centos6 and Fedora is also my preferred LANG. You can also "uncheck" export or set locale in terminal settings (OSX) /etc/profile

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

I recently had the same issue on OS X Sierra with bash shell, and thanks to answers above I only had to edit the file

~/.bash_profile 

and append those lines

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8