Re: UTF-8 issue

[Chet Ramey]

Mariano Suárez-Alvarez wrote:
> Hi,
>
> someone just made me note the following behavior with respect to UTF-8
> handling: on a bash command line,
>
>         1) type: read A
>         2) type a ñ character, that is, a U+00F1 LATIN SMALL LETTER N
>         WITH TILDE character
>         3) now backspace it away and hit Enter.
>         4) now say: echo $A | od -x
>         5) you should see 
>         
>                 0000000 0ac3
>                 0000002
>                 
>         although it should be just 0a. (Note UTF-8 for the ñ
>         character is 0xC3 0xB1, so I'm getting the remnants of the
>         deleted ñ) 
>         
>
> I don't know if this is due to bash doing something wrong during the
> read (maybe it does not set up the line discipline correctly?) or
> something else. So you are my first try at nailing this ;-)

I am able to reproduce this using a UTF-8 locale, but I'm not sure it's
bash's problem.  Since this is a buffered read, bash just calls read(2)
and returns characters one at a time to the read builtin. read(2)
returns two characters:  the first byte of the multibyte character, and
newline.

Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
( ``Discere est Dolere'' -- chet )
                                                Live...Laugh...Love
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@po.cwru.edu 
http://tiswww.tis.cwru.edu/~chet/