Cannot paste text in xfce4-terminal

Question

After updating my distribution with Xfce 4.14, I am unable to copy and paste some characters into xfce4-terminal. For example, I can paste "test" but not "test α".

This is highly frustrating. I would prefer if the unknown character was replaced with a question mark, or anything really. Is there a way around this?

Answer 1

This was answered on SuperUser. Paraphrasing that answer:

Is the locale blank? It must be set to xxx.UTF-8 for the terminals to support non-ASCII characters. To enable Unicode support,

• Add a line to /etc/locale.gen en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
• Run locale-gen
• Add LANG=en_US.UTF-8 to /etc/locale.conf
• Log out and log in again

Answer 2

The following must be set in xfce4-terminal:

preferences -> advanced -> default character encoding = UTF-8

The LANG environment variable in the shell does not matter, for example mine is set to LANG=en_US, but it's still working.