Am 1998-12-03 um 7:46 h hat odonnell@zk3.dec.com geschrieben:
> 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,
...
> 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.
UTF-8 (cf. <http://czyborra.com/utf/#UTF-8>) uses 1 through 3 bytes per BMP
character (1 through 4 bytes per Unicode character). In order to "parse
strings into characters", the processing program must undo the UTF-8
encoding. A program based on the 1-byte-amounts-to-one-character model
will not be able to sensibly handle UTF-8 encoded data.
Vi, as any other program, has to know about this encoding, in order to
perform correctly; a classical, 8-bit based, Vi implementation would not
even get the cursor position right, with UTF-8 encoded data. At the very
least, Vi will have to take the UTF-8 mechanism into account when counting
characters and calculating cursor movements. Hence, I cannot understand how
> It's easy to have a vi that processes UTF-8-encoded data.
In order to process data in various encodings, such as ISO 8859-1, UTF-8,
and Unicode (UTF-16), a programm has to know about the encoding of the
actual data. Hence, I cannot understand how a program, such as Vi, could
work with a locale that does not cover the encoding.
Please, explain.
Best wishes,
Otto Stolz
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