perl-unicode

Re: perlunicode comment - when Unicode does not happen

2003-12-28 10:30:04
Jungshik Shin <jshin(_at_)mailaps(_dot_)org> writes:
That will work if there's en_GB.UTF-8 available for him in his
particular Unixes and assuming using UTF-8 locales won't break other
things.

Just so we get this clear. A year or so back I - as a Unicode advocate - tried 
to switch to en_GB.utf8. Within minutes I had two text editors core
dump on me because UTF-8 locale means text is UTF-8 and I had opened
a file which contained text like �1.42 in good-ole-8859-1.
Also perl5.8.0 made that same assumption.


IIRC, he explicitly mentioned 'Linux' in his message. Besides,
Solaris, Compaq Tru64, AIX, and HP/UX [1] have all supported UTF-8 locales
for a 'long' time 

And XFree86's handling of compose and or dead keys is far less intuitive
than Solaris's ! 

This is another area that drives me up the wall - X has a "locale" fixation
as well - which determines input methods and font-sets (another doomed 
compromise...).

I never implied that, let alone saying that. (I always prefer to say
Unix in place of Linux. To me, Linux is just one of many Unix) And,
please check out recent commercial Unix. They DO offer UTF-8 locales as I
wrote above (Solaris and AIX had offered solid UTF-8 locales years before

Solaris's UTF-8 locale support for en_GB was rather rough.

Anyway, exactly because of the unavailability
of UTF-8 locales for whatever reason, we've been discussing this issue
(to convert Perl's internal Unicode to and from the 'native' encoding
in file I/O.).

The ORIGINAL suggestion was that "locale" told you the "native" encoding
my point is it doesn't. 






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