Cut not working with multi-byte UTF-8 characters

[Patrik Hirvinen]

Hi,

This bug was found on an Ubuntu 5.10 GNU/Linux x86 using cut version 
5.2.1. Locale used was en_US.UTF-8.

When fed text that includes multi-byte characters, cut makes the 
assumption that one byte corresponds to one character, even though the 
locale would clearly suggest otherwise.

Attached is an example file, containing in UTF-8 format the character or 
Unicode code point U+00E4 and a newline, or in hexadecimal, "0xc3a40a". 
"cut -c 1 example.bin" should thus produce 'ä', yet it's output is 
identical to "cut -b 1 example.bin", not "cut -b 2 example.bin" as it 
                                                       should be.

Thanks

Patrik Hirvinen
address@hidden
+358-(0)40-7186320

example.bin
Description: Binary data