Re: I've made a simple program, showing UTF-8 lower but not uppercase working

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, amores perros wrote:

> Since my last post here, I've proceeded to isolate a test program

I read that, but it's been a busy week.
The normal libncurses.so cannot do anything useful with UTF-8.
It won't produce it, cannot read it.

It occurs to me that I could have handled the special case of Latin-1 in a 
UTF-8 locale, but that isn't generally useful (though I do that in the 
text editor vile).  Something for a to-do list, e.g., to handle the 
various legacy code that doesn't know anything about locales.  It won't be 
in ncurses 5.5 though.

To read/write UTF-8, you need the libncursesw flavor.

> successfully printing a UTF-8 string out via printf, but then
> invoking ncurses and observing mixed results -- the lowercase
> letters are ok, but the upperones are apparently trashed (I see
> open boxes, and more characters than I should).
>
> I'm still testing on ncurses5.4 from debian linux stable.

Debian/testing has a ncursesw5.4

> I'll enclose the source of my test program below.
>
> I was unable to test using cchar_t and widechar variants
> of the API, which I gather should exist on some versions,
> because they were absent from /usr/include/ncurses.h
> (where I expected to find them).

They exist in the ncursesw version.

> I'm not clear whether UTF-8 is supposed to be supported
> on ncurses 5.4. Judging by some remarks about it here
> http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/announce.html
> I deduce (but am not positive)  that it should be supported.

UTF-8's worked reasonably well since before ncurses 5.4;
most of the fixes since then have dealt with multicolumn
characters.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net