Re: locale-*independent* vi editor supporting UTF-8

From: odonnell@zk3.dec.com
Date: Thu Dec 03 1998 - 10:40:37 EST


Jungshik Shin wrote:
   . . .Well, I thought I made myself clear. I'm NOT interested in
   locale-DEPENDENT UTF-8 support in vi whether it's under Solaris 2.6/7 or
   some other OS(I guess AIX 4 has one, too). If that's my interest, I
   wouldn't have asked the question in the first place. What I'm looking
   for is locale-INDEPENDENT vi supporting UTF-8 which can be run even
   under Unix with POSIX locale only.

I'm late in replying to this, but I'm really wondering about
your request. According to the XPG4 vi man page, the current
locale controls many aspects of vi's behavior, including the
way strings are parsed into characters, how characters are
classified, case conversion, regular expressions, range expressions,
etc., etc. If you only have the POSIX locale, vi only gives you
the behavior defined in that locale. And that's basically U.S.
English.

Now, locales and encodings are two different things. POSIX.2,
which defines the contents and syntax of locales, does not say
anything about how characters are encoded, so it's perfectly fine
to use UTF-8 as the encoding for any locale. And then for vi to
operate under any UTF-8 locale. But vi uses the information in
the current locale (UTF-8 or otherwise) to decide how to parse
characters, etc.

It's easy to have a vi that processes UTF-8-encoded data. But I
don't see how it's possible to have a vi that is independent of
locale.

-----------------------
Sandra Martin O'Donnell
odonnell@zk3.dec.com



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