Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> writes:
The <ctype.h> macros are just fundamentally broken in any locale that
has multibyte characters: you cannot squeeze a multibyte character
into an input that is supposed to be either an "unsigned char" or EOF.
Vendors can choose either to violate the spec (say, by interpreting
the "int" input as a Unicode codepoint) or to produce useless results.
It's worth pointing out that the official prototype for the ctype macros
all say they take "int" as an argument, and POSIX says they take as
an argument a "character". So interpreting that argument as a Unicode
codepoint (assuming you're currently in a Unicode locale) is, from my
reading, within the spec.
You need to read a bit further down, where POSIX says
The c argument is an int, the value of which the application shall
ensure is representable as an unsigned char or equal to the value of
the macro EOF. If the argument has any other value, the behavior is
undefined.
(C99 has identical verbiage.)
The reason to declare the argument as int is so that these can take EOF,
which I suppose is meant to allow them to be applied directly to the
result of getc() ... though why anyone would write code that way is
not clear to me. Anyway, interpreting the input as a Unicode code point,
for values above U+7F (or, if you stretch it unreasonably, U+FF) is
very clearly outside the spec.
regards, tom lane