At 23:24 +0100 2001-11-12, Markus Kuhn wrote: >Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 23:24:20 +0100 (CET) >From: Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Re: UTF8 Terminal Detection >Original-Recipient: rfc822;[EMAIL PROTECTED] > ><cut> > >On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote: > > > On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Daniel Yacob wrote: >> > > Is there a way to detect if the terminal that a script is running in >> > > can display UTF-8 text? >> > >> > No, not by communicating with the terminal directly. There is > ><cut> > >And loose information about what encoding is used in our files? No, not a >good idea. I think, if you use inappropriate terminals, best-effort >filter tools such as luit and screen are what you need.
This correspondence thread (and others) has raised a question in my mind that someone may be able to answer. It appears that a LOT of problems could be settled if a better locale environment standard for *UNIX* (and clones) were to be put in place. I have in mind the sort of structures that are inherent in the old Macintosh system, where a locale environment included a set of keyboard mappings and input methods, country and language codes, methods of writing dates and time, and collating sequences. Of course, in a *UNIX* (POSIX) OS, the structure would be a set of methods associated with a locale environment, maybe like the localisation structures in Java Text classes. The question is -- is there anyone working on standardising this aspect so that it IS meaningful to query environment variables and expect to get the relevant information? George -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
