The C locale

[Lapo Luchini]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> No, it isn't. UTF-16 filename characters that can't be represented in
> the current charset are encoded by a ^N followed by the character's
> UTF-8 representation.

OK, right.

> For example, a Windows filename "bäh" turns into "bÃ
¤h" in the C locale,
> while it shows up correctly with explicitly set ISO-8859-1 or CP1252.

Uh? Doesn't seem so to me: if I create "bäh" in WindowsExplorer, then
open up an UTF-8 mintty console I have a consistent output with both
LANG=C and LANG=it_IT.UTF-8 (of course, since right now C is UTF-8):

% LANG=C ls -l|egrep b.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 lapo None     0 Sep 22 09:53 bäh
% LANG=it_IT.UTF-8 ls -l|egrep b.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 lapo None     0 22 Sep 09:53 bäh

So I'm not sure what do you mean with 'a Windows filename "bäh" turns
into "bÃ
¤h" in the C locale'... you mean that a script sees it as
62C3A468 as opposed as 62E468? Or that actual "bÃ
¤h" is shown somewhere?

As "bÃ
¤h" is just a representation, and it depends on the charset the
console expects (and in fact in this UTF-8-encoded message, it will be
probably represented with 62C385C2A468)... if the console is UTF-8,
what's currently shown is what I'd expect.
If OTOH we're talking what it is in raw form and not of what is shown
(i.e. about "3 bytes" vs a "4 bytes" string) well, that's a different
issue, and I'm not sure why a program should prefer a 3-byte
representations as opposed to a 4-byte one...?

But OTOH as far as "not caring" goes, it sure can be a nice feature to
be retro-compatible in that single case, since the behavior is not
well-defined anyways...
But again, if a script creates a filename that happens to contain
Japanese characters (or even umlauts or r-quotes/l-quotes) I would
expect to see that on the filesystem too, and not some random-looking
escaped-sequence...

> Btw, are you actually using the C locale?

Not usually, but it happens from time to time (mostly in script, or in
cases such as the monotone "make check" unit tests; one which tries to
create UTF-8 filenames and then ISO-8859-1 filenames currently fail).

-- 
Lapo Luchini - http://lapo.it/

“Endure. In enduring, grow strong.” (Dak'kon, videogame "Torment", 1999)


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