On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> Trond Trosterud wrote on 2001-04-17 09:27 UTC:
> > I have scanned through all info I have found, but still do not quite see
> > how basic unix commands such as wc, sort, etc. handle UTF-8.
>
> We just got support for UTF-8 locales into the GNU C library (glibc 2.2)
> a few months ago, which was one important prerequisite for adding UTF-8
> support to application programs. Support for applications will now
> follow based on feedback from users who found in experiments that
> something doesn't work yet with the very latest releases.
>
> > So: Will some unix-flavours cope with the issue better than others?
>
> It was my impression that Linux is at the moment the by far leading
> POSIX operating system with regard to UTF-8 support (if we don't count
> Thompson's and Ritchie's Plan9 operating system of course, which
> switched over to UTF-8 as its only character encoding almost 10 years
> ago). Followed by Solaris and AIX. Don't know about Mac OS X.
Do you really think that UTF-8 support in Linux is better than
that in Solaris and AIX? I don't have any significant experience with
UTF-8 under Solaris and AIX. However, AFAIK, both of them have offered
UTF-8 locales since mid-1990's while Linux/glibc just got there several
months ago as you wrote. In addition, judging from what Sun engineers
wrote to Unicode mailing list, most of Unix tools (sed, wc, awk, sort,
etc) under Solaris seem to work reasonably well in UTF-8 locales under
Solaris. Also, I believe Solaris has input method support for UTF-8
locales in X11.
As for MacOS X, I'm not sure of the release version, but
a beta version didn't even have 'iconv'(sure, GPLed libiconv can be
installed, but the lack of 'iconv' may indicate something). Mac OS X
may take a completely different approach to UTF-8 support and I18N
than traditional Unix systems do.
Jungshik Shin
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
