On 10 November 2010 22:45, Ken Thomases ken@codeweavers.com wrote:
On Nov 10, 2010, at 2:27 PM, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
--- On Wed, 10/11/10, Ken Thomases ken@codeweavers.com wrote:
Are you sure about that? Checking on a couple of Linux systems here, the "locale" command reports:
$ locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" ...
mine (fedora x86_64) does the utf8 thing:
# locale LANG=en_GB.utf8 LC_CTYPE="en_GB.utf8" ...
so there is some truth in the reporter's assertion - what it means is that it varies between different linux'es!!!
I should have been clearer. The output just reflects your environment. So, you have LANG set to en_GB.utf8. I had LANG set to en_US.UTF-8. My only point was to say that the "UTF-8" form is acceptable. It was not to suggest that "utf8" is not, nor that one or the other is a standard.
The real question is: does the Linux C library accept 'UTF-8' in the environment variables? I believe it does, which is useful because that's what Mac OS X requires. (It doesn't accept "utf8".)
For example, the following reports just fine on some Linux systems here:
LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8 locale
As does your case:
LC_ALL=en_GB.utf8 locale
But the following both produce some diagnostics indicating that the C library is choking on the value:
LC_ALL=en_GB.bogus locale LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-9 locale
I take this to mean it's a legitimate test of whether a value is valid. Further, it indicates that (at least some) Linuxes take either form.
I'm getting the same behaviour (Ubuntu 10.10) -- LC_ALL accepts either utf8 or UTF-8 for en_GB, en_IE, etc. The caveat here is that the primary locale needs to exist (and presumably needs to have a UTF-8 valiant present).
That is, as I don't have a French locale (fr_FR) installed on my machine, the following reports errors:
LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8 locale
This means that systems that don't have the English locale installed (en_US or en_GB, whichever is chosen) will still fail.
What is wrong with iterating over the content of `locale -a` or `locale -a | grep -F utf8` to find a UTF-8 based locale? Or even:
LC_ALL=`locale -a | grep -F utf8 | head -n 1` sed ... authors.c
- Reece