Invalid encoding from Debian Wheezy files

[Funkygoby]

Again, Hello!
I have a problem it seems I can't solve. I am french and i have problem with accentued and "ç" character.
I managed:
-to set LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 in ~/.profile. LANG and LC_ALL are purposely unset.
-in X, I have the right encoding in terminal, vim, mousepad, etc...
-under tty, keyboard input is fine but through more/less/vi/vim the text encoding doesn't work

My guess is that some part of the system pays attention to my locales, some don't care. This is a little issue but I think it's linked to the real problem:
Lastly, I filled ~/ with my data from an external drive. This data comes directly from my ex-debian install.
Xfce4(?) will append "invalid encoding" at the folder/file name if it contains those problematic character. It even messed up completly some folder name: "01-LAM~1" instead of "01 - La Mauvaise Réputation".

Thank you for your attention.

[LeFrettchen]

Les accents, c'est le mal !
Il faut pas ! Jamais !

Accentued characters are evil !
Do not ! Never !

[blackhole]

I would also advise against just dumping the dotfiles from a different OS into $HOME and expecting everything to work as before.

edit:

J65nko, I know he wasn't specific, it was just a "friendly" warning (I also tend to think of everything as "data", I've also seen configuration files referred to as "data").

Funkygoby, I probably misunderstood the issue you were having, but wasn't jumping on you with accusations, even if it seemed like it - apologies for that. I can't add anything further, so won't bump/clutter the thread.

[J65nko]

Cynwolf, as far as I understand, he only copied data from Debian to his home directory, not the dotfiles

Funkygoby, are you aware of this section in the OpenBSD FAQ : http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#locales ?

[Funkygoby]

Thank you all for your replis. The FAQ answered the first part of my question, the main problem remains though.
As always, i missed some lines in the FAQ. After re-reading the locales section, I learned that UTF-8 isn't supported in tty.
So, in order to properly read french character in ttys, the file needs to be ISO8859-1/15 encoded and your locales set accordingly. Not a real problem, I avoid ttys anyway.

Now to the main problem: file/folder names.
@LeFrettchen: A lot of my file comes from other people, some are french, other are spanish, english. Many files comes with national specific character handled by UTF-8.

@cynwulf: This as nothing to do with my concern. I learned (during my early days with ubuntu) to avoid porting conf files between different system or version. This post deals with data files: music, documents, pdfs, etc...

@J65nko: Re-reading this FAQ page helped me sort of, but didn't solve the main problem.

I did some experiments:
-Under tty, touch éà will produce a file named "??" under tty and thunar.
-Under xfce4, creating a new file in thunar named éà will behave just fine but under the tty, it will appear as "??"

I copied my data using rsync under Xterminal.
When I have some times, I will try to understand how filenames are stored. Maybe I could use some encoding converter on the source data and then re-run rsync.

[Funkygoby]

Just to say, I found something interesting in man mount_msdos:
the options iocharset.
I don't have an OpenBSD right to try this. Maybe next time...