| From: Conor McDermottroe <lists at mcdermottroe.com>
| Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 20:01:00 +0000
|
| On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 21:04 +0100, Brian Foster wrote:
| > incidently, how does `cat -v' play with UTF-8? ;-)
|
| It doesn't, at least not in the version I have. As the man page says:
|
| BUGS
| [...]
| The cat utility does not recognize multibyte characters when
| the -t or -v option is in effect.
the manual page for GNU cat(1), “cat (coreutils) 5.2.1 April 2004”,
at least as distributed in SUSE 9.1, does not have a BUGS section.
in any case, I was trying to make a rhetorical point: namely,
the definition of `-v' — printing bytes that are non-printing
non–US-ASCII characters in the ^ and M- notations — is not too
useful (incompatible?) with UCS/Unicode(/UTF-8). and also, to
do something more sensible (e.g., print non–US-ASCII as UCS U+,
C99 \u and \U, &tc), cat(1) would (probably) have to interpret
the contents of the files per the locale. which is an absurd
functionality to add to `cat'. so what was silly in the first
place, `-v', now becomes even sillier.
OTOH, a specialist utility, such as the vis(1) Pike et.al.
mentioned, could/should be so extended. (now that I think
about it, I wonder if a charmap(5) file for use with (GNU)
iconv(1)/iconv(3) is possible to implement a "UCS `vis'"?)
cheers!
-blf-
--
Experienced (20+ yrs) kernel/software Eng: | Brian Foster Montpellier,
• Unix, embedded, &tc; • Linux; • doc; | blf at utvinternet.ie FRANCE
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