Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>>>
>>>Excuse me, what a mess that would create! How would you know which encoding
>>>/etc/passwd is in? What if you have both Japanese and Russian users on
>>>your system? UTF-8 is the only candidate. You can use iconv to convert
>>>user's input to UTF-8.
>>>
>>>
>>I told you... it has to be in the *system default* character
>>set/locale. In practice, UTF-8 is the only choice for multilingual
>>support, but there is a fair number of systems which currently use
>>ISO-8859-1.
>
> What is the *system default character set/locale*? where is it
> defined?
>
Unfortunately it's different for each system, and it's an unbelievable
mess. On most systems it happens to be whatever the "C" or "POSIX"
locales are defined as (when it comes to charset, these locales can be
anything as long as it includes the necessary characters; they are, of
course, usually the same.) However, a small handful of systems actually
export a different locale using environment variables.
-hpa
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
