[CCing bug-gnulib] Rich Felker wrote: > I don't think the '*' has anything to do with it being a bullet > character. It's just the implementation-defined replacement character > musl's iconv uses.
Correct. > I would guess the code in bison and coreutils printf is assuming the > non-conforming glibc behavior for iconv of returning an error if a > character from the input is not exactly representable in the output, > rather than making replacements and returning the number of inexact > conversions made. Yes and no. The code is not making assumptions about a particular iconv() implementation. But it needs to distinguish two categories of replacements done by iconv(): - those that are harmless (for example when replacing a Unicode TAG character U+E00xx with an empty output), - those that are better not presented to the user, if the programmer has specified a fallback (for example, replacing all non-ASCII characters with NUL, '?', or '*'). The standards don't help in making the distinction. Therefore whether you consider said glibc and libiconv behaviour as "non-conforming" or not is irrelevant. I have now adjusted the code to handle musl libc better. Bruno