UTF8 and printf '%2s' (coreutils 5.2.1)

[Tobias Burnus]

Hello,

I encountered the following issue in coreutils 5.2.1:
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
/usr/bin/printf 'A%2sB\n' '2'
# Prints A 2B
/usr/bin/printf 'A%2sB\n' '²'
# Prints A²B instead of A ²B

In other words: printf counts 2byte UTF-8 characters as two characters
instead of one.

(BASH 2.05b's built-in printf has by the way the same problem, which is
fixed in BASH 3.0.)

Regards,

Tobias