bug#17196: UTF-8 printf string formating problem

[Bob Proulx]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Yes printf follows the C standard which only considers bytes.
> ...
> I don't think we'd be able to change the current operation of printf
> due to backwards compat reasons? Though we might be able to somehow leverage
> the existing multibyte character aware alignment/truncation code in:
> http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=gl/lib/mbsalign.c;hb=HEAD

Dan Douglas pointed out in the corresponding discussion in bug-bash
that ksh uses the L modifier.

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2014-04/msg00021.html

  Dan Douglas wrote:
  > ksh93 already has this feature using the "L" modifier:
  > 
  > ksh -c "printf '%.3Ls\n' $'\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605'"
  > ★★★

At least there is prior art for it.

Bob