# Internationalisation

If any packets contain international characters, ®ina; will attempt to convert these to your local character encoding as it writes them to the output.

You can tell ®ina; what character encoding to use by setting standard locale-related environment variables, such as `LANG`, `LC_CTYPE` or `LC_ALL`.

For example, if `LANG` is set to `en_AU` then output will be written in the Western European character set `ISO-8859-1`, and if `LANG` is set to `en_AU.UTF-8` then output will be written in the universal character set `UTF-8`.

Typically these environment variables will already be set for you when you install your &linux; system, and ®ina; will just use the right character set out of the box. See your &linux; system reference for further information on supporting different locales.