Printing UTF-8 characters

[Conrad Meyer]

You want LC_CTYPE.

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 6:38 PM Farhan Khan <khanzf at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 10:51 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 01 Feb 2018 10:42:36 -0500 Farhan Khan <khanzf at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Sorry, that was a poorly phrased question on my part. Let me try again.
> >> I am trying to make text align in columns in a terminal. My
> >> understanding is that characters above 0x7E are 3 bytes in length. A
> >> modern terminal will render that as either a single question-mark or
> >> the character itself, making terminal column alignment easy. But how
> >> would an older terminal display a 3-byte character? I am worried that
> >> would render as 3 question marks and throw off column alignment. If
> >> so, is there a proper way to perform alignment for both newer and
> >> older terminals?
> >
> > UTF-8 can use upto 4 bytes to encode a unicode point,
> > depending on the script.
> >
> > For what you want, you can use openoffice like programs that
> > understand unicode and can do complex text layout. Normal
> > terminal programs typically use monospace (fixed width) fonts
> > are simply not capable of what you want. The assumption that
> > one char means one rectangular cell on the screen is too
> > deeply woven in them.  Particularly for Indic languages this
> > just doesn't work, You may have N unicode points, each of
> > which require 3 bytes, all together map to a one single glyph.
>
> Hi all,
>
> To follow-up from my earlier poorly asked question from a few months
> back, how do I determine if the terminal is capable of printing UTF-8
> encoded strings and/or unicode in general?
> The obvious answer is to check the LANG variable via getenv(3), but
> what if you are using "en_US.UTF-8" vs "en_GB.UTF-8"? Should I just
> check for the string "UTF-8" in the LANG variable?
>
> My concern is printing characters above 0x7F on terminals/encodings
> that are not capable of displaying them, resulting in unusual
> behavior.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Farhan Khan
> PGP Fingerprint: B28D 2726 E2BC A97E 3854 5ABE 9A9F 00BC D525 16EE
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org mailing list
> https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>