bug#35920: strftime incorrectly assumes that nstrftime will produce UTF-8

[John Cowan]

That's a mug's game: I've been there and tried it (not in Scheme). I recommend writing a strftime in Scheme from scratch.  It's not that hard; the most annoying thing is getting into the locale files to handle the locale-sensitive directives (month name, weekday name, AM/PM, and the ordering of dates).

On Sun, Jun 30, 2019 at 5:14 PM Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> wrote:

reopen 35920
thanks

Hi Ludovic,

> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> Here's a patch that might fix the problem, but I don't have time to test
>> it right now.
>
> It works! :-)  I wrote tests and pushed it as
> ab2fd70ef1e36c6532128b73082809ef3c056556.

On my system, I found that my proposed patch caused one of the existing
tests to fail.  The problem is that if the format string includes
characters that are not representable in the current locale encoding, it
will fail.  It seems to me that this could break existing code that
currently works.  User code that uses 'strftime' might never encode the
resulting string in the locale encoding.

I was planning to rewrite the code to scan for the '%' escapes
ourselves, to call 'strftime' for each escape sequence (without
including the surrounding text), and to concatenate the results.

> I forgot to change the commit author to you before pushing, apologies!

No worries.  Thanks for working on it.

      Mark