Roland Mainz wrote: > ... if I interpret the situation correctly you're output an UTF-8 > encoding string, right ? If that's "true" then there is a _serious_ > problem since such a value would be an invalid charatcer sequence for > non-UTF-8 multibyte encodings. You may get away in some shells like > ksh93, but only by "accident" because one of the implementation details > of ksh93 is that it treats all things as plain strings unless it needs > to do special handling like quotes, IFS etc. In that case the shell > script will break because you hit invalid charatcers... which is AFAIK > bad... ;-(
Note that the design of UTF-8 is such that "plain ASCII" values 00-7F always represent the plain ASCII characters. Non-ASCII characters, including all of the bytes of multibyte sequences, are always in the range 80-FF. That largely protects UTF-8 strings from misinterpretation by applications that only understand ASCII.
