Re: [bug-gawk] Unicode hyphens in man pages

[arnold]

Hi.

Thank you for taking the tie to report an issue.

Daniel Reimer <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hey,
>
> I'm not familiar with formatting standards for man page sources, but
> when I use 'man awk' (awk is linked to gawk on my up-to-date arch
> linux, I presume that the awk man page comes from gawk), I get unicode
> hyphens or minus or whatever it is called ('???', code 8722) before some
> options like '-F'.
>
> This is very annoying since it makes it impossible to search for
> options reliably (or at all, since I don't have unicode characters on
> my keyboard). Is there any particular reason for this? A quick search
> didn't find unicode hyphens in any other man page (there are none in
> the gawk man page).

The gawk man page follows standard troff conventions of using \- as
the dash for options like -F, -v and so on.  It is the GNU troff suite
that turns that character into a Unicode hypen.

I suspect that if you do 

        LC_ALL=C man gawk

the Unicode characters will go away and come out as plain old ASCII
minus signs.

You might try something like

        alias man='LC_ALL=C man'

in your shell startup file as a workaround to avoid this problem in
the future.  Otherwise, please ask on the groff help list (if there is
such, I'm not sure).

Thanks,

Arnold