Encoding issue with GNU Screen

[TerryP]

OS Version: FreeBSD 7-Stable
Screen Version: Screen version 4.00.03 (FAU) 23-Oct-06
Top level Terms: rxvt-unicode v9.05, xterm v237
PAGER: less -FiJqX
EDITOR: vim
Locale output:

Terry@dixie$ locale                                                        5:02
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
Terry@dixie$                                                               5:02

Top level $TERM is = rxvt / xterm (^ respectively ^), while the screen sessions use $TERM is = screen.

I first noticed the problem when I had to bring out an old friend in my toolbox (perl), when using perldoc I would get strange accented a or A like characters in place of certain characters in the output, so I just did a ssh to my server and read the perldocs there (it's an OpenBSD box with no LC_* or LANG settings in use) and things worked perfect. When I finished my scripts, I noticed the plain old documentation output to my term was just as wacky. As another test, I opened (in vim) some old files with German umlauts, which were also displayed crazy -> as they would be under the wrong locale.


If I open urxvt or xterm and then run perldoc (or check my files) in that without screen, everything works correctly. I've tried screens -U, -a, -O, and -T options but no dice.


Has anyone else experienced this issue with screen, or perhaps know of a work around?