Re: UTF8

[nisse%lysator.liu.se@localhost (Niels Möller)]

der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost> writes:

> Hm?  I have no LC_CTYPE in my environment and have got by fine without
> it for years.  The only places I've been able to think of that anything
> knows that I'm using 8859-1 (which is what I use by default) are:

It's basically needed whenever information is transferred to and from
remote systems, using protocols that are charset aware. E.g. if you
use a text web-browser to access pages written in utf-8, your browser
will do a better job displaying the content if it knows if your terminal
is configured to use latin1, utf8 or koi8r.

I think the primary reason I started setting LC_CTYPE many years ago
was that GNU ls uses the standard C locale system and isprint() to
figure out which characters in filenames are printable, and which
should be displayed specially. Don't know how BSD ls behaves in this
respect.

  $ touch räksmörgås
  $ ls
  räksmörgås
  $ LC_CTYPE='' ls
  r?ksm?rg?s

> - The Content-Type: header my MUA is configured to default to;
> - $LESSCHARDEF (and that just knows which characters are printable,
>   basically; it couldn't tell you 8859-1 vs 8859-2);

These are application specific configurations. I think it's preferable
to use a single configuration mechanism, namely LC_CTYPE.

> I don't know what I should set LC_CTYPE to to indicate 8859-1.

If you're saying C locales are broken, I'll agree that they're broken
in several different ways. That's why I wrote "comparatively trivial",
not "trivial"...

IMO, it *ought* to work to simply set LC_CTYPE to "iso-8859-1" if
that's what you're using, and LC_PAPER to "a4" if you want that. But
the current state of affairs seems to be that the simple way doesn't
work, one has to figure out a corresponding geographic region. E.g. I
use LC_CTYPE=sv_SE, and that seems to work for me. If I ever wanted,
say, "b5" as the default paper size, I have no idea which region, if
any, that choice would correspond to.

Regards,
/Niels