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[Implemented] [coreutils] Partial UTF-8 support for "cut -c"


From: jaime.mosquera
Subject: [Implemented] [coreutils] Partial UTF-8 support for "cut -c"
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 21:19:54 +0200 (CEST)

Good evening.

I have partially implemented the option "-c" ("--characters") for UTF-8 
non-ASCII characters, so that using a text in any language other than English 
does not result in rather subtle bugs ("cut -c 1-79" produces 79 characters, 
except that lines with one accented letter are one character short; 
furthermore, depending on where you cut, you may get "partial", unprintable 
characters). My modifications are attached as a patch file (created through 
git) to the last version found on GitHub (as cloned earlier today).

This implementation has two, somewhat important shortcomings:

* Other encodings are not implemented. It should not be too difficult to 
implement UTF-16, and UTF-32 definitely less so, but branching between them 
would make the code a bit more difficult to understand and require a simple way 
to detect the current encoding and act accordingly. Furthermore, more encodings 
would be needed (Japan still uses non-Unicode encodings with some frequency), 
so I decided to stick with just UTF-8.

* Modifier characters are treated as individual characters, instead of being 
processed along with the characters they modify, as Unicode dictates. 
Decisively, many languages from Western Europe (Spanish, Portuguese...) might 
or might not work with this program, depending on which kind of accented 
letters are produced (on my computer it worked perfectly).

On the other hand, missing bytes in a multibyte UTF-8 characters are correctly 
handled (the incomplete character is printed, but the next character is read 
whole, without misreading any bytes as part of the previous character).

It is my hope that you should find this first approach to the problem 
sufficient for most uses, and incorporate it into the mainstream code.

Greetings.

(Should my modifications be big enough to require it for copyright reasons, my 
name is "Jaime Mosquera", and I obviously agree to the terms of the GNU GPL.)

Attachment: utf8cut.patch
Description: Text Data


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