Determine the default character encoding in a RedHat system

Solution 1:

The locale command holds the key to these secrets.
(There are probably other RedHat-specific ways to do this, but locale will work on pretty much any *NIX system.)

Solution 2:

I had problem with ISO-8859-1 files in a server UTF-8 and I was force to change

You can see de default language using the command:

echo $LANG

Edit the file: /etc/sysconfig/i18n and modify the property. See the example bellow:

LANG="pt_BR.ISO-8859-1"