Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh architecture discussion: format engine character set

[Ken Hornstein]

>> - The POSIX standard functions for this, wcwidth() and wcswidth(), work
>>   on the current locale, which is not guaranteed to support UTF-8 (or
>>   even support 8-bit characters).
>
>Yes, but can't setlocale() temporarily change it to a UTF-8 locale?
>
>Granted, there's no guarantee that a UTF-8 locale exists and what it's
>called if it does exist, but maybe it would be appropriate to have a
>configure check to find one?

Well, unfortunately there's not a wonderful way to determine that (and
since nmh gets packaged up that's not a job autoconf can do; it needs
to be determined at runtime).  I suppose you could run "locale -a" and
look for everything that contains UTF-8.  Or ... utf8?  Again, not a
wonderful solution (and I see some Linux systems have something like
address@hidden, which I won't pretend to understand).

Really, the POSIX character functions treat the locale and characters
themselves as opaque blocks; if you want to do something crazy like
override the native locale or work on characters that are not part of
the native locale then you're really stepping outside of the POSIX API
box.  And I guess part of me really wonders why on earth that would be a
good idea.

--Ken