wide characters, get_wch() and form_driver() - cannot get them working together.

[Adam Spragg]

Hi.

Having more problems with ncurses and wide character support. Demo 
program attached. This has been tested on Debian Unstable with their 
ncurses 5.6+20080531-1 packages. I am willing to try installing the 
upstream packages if anyone thinks it will make a difference. My LANG 
is set to "en_GB.UTF-8", and I'm compiling it with "cc -o wide 
wide.c -lformw -lncursesw"

I create a simple form, put it in the middle of the screen and allow the 
user to enter characters. I put the results of get_wch() down at the 
bottom of the screen, before trying to add the character to the buffer.

If I set the TRY_MULTIBYTE define at the top of the file to 0, run the 
program and type "abc£" ('a', 'b', 'c', '£' (pound)) then at the point 
where I call "form_driver()" with value 163 (wide character code 
for '£') then I get a seg fault. I'm not really expecting this to work 
as the ncurses KEY_* codes appear to start at 256, which means that any 
unicode characters above that just won't work. But I think a seg fault 
is a little harsh.

If I set TRY_MULITBYTE to 1, rerun and type the same characters, the 163 
is converted to a utf-8 multibyte sequence, these characters are then 
sent to form_driver() one at a time. Except I get an E_UNKNOWN_COMMAND 
(-8) trying to add the first byte. :( The same thing happens if I try 
to paste unicode characters in from an x terminal (actually Konsole) 
middle-click.

So, uh, how is this supposed to work?

I've looked through the ncurses-intro, ncurses-programming-howto, 
hackguide and announce files, as well as the ncurses(7), get_wch(3) and 
form_driver(3) man pages and can't see anything that I'm doing wrong. 
There doesn't appear to be some kind of form_driver_w() or similar wide 
version of the form driver that I should be using instead according to 
all the documentation, and a grep of all the header files. A search of 
the mailing list archives turns up the following thread:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2006-12/msg00018.html

But I couldn't quite figure out if what the resolution of that was. The 
thread just kind of stopped.

What the hell am I doing wrong?


Second, and this bit is more of a rant than a serious request for help, 
but am I using get_wch() and its return values correctly? Does anyone 
have a better way of using it than with multiple switch statements?

I realise that you're just implementing The Open Group's spec here and 
aren't responsible for the API design, so I hope I'm not insulting you 
when I say that it looks to me like whoever designed it was on some 
serious WTF-inducing crack.

For instance, I want Ctrl+H and KEY_BACKSPACE to do exactly the same 
thing, but at the moment those bits of code are more than 50 lines 
apart. Similarly Ctrl+C and KEY_BREAK. Ditto '\r', '\n' and KEY_ENTER. 
Why the fsck are the KEY_* codes not defined outside the usable unicode 
range and a single wint_t returned from get_wch() can return any KEY_* 
code or a unicode character? Srsly - wtf?!?


Yours frustratedly,

Adam

-- 
Adam Spragg                             mailto:address@hidden
Developer
SMS Card                                       http://www.smscard.com/


It reverses the logical flow of conversation!
> Why?
> > No.
> > > Should I top post?

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22top+posting%22

wide.c
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