Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> [EILSEQ]
> A wide-character code that does not correspond to a valid
> character has been detected.
>
> That means that the functions are *required* to fail ("shall fail")
> if encoding errors can be detected, that -1 must be returned, and
> that errno must be set.
I understand what you're saying, but I think strictly following the standard
is a bit silly here. This is a very poor way for the fastidious programmer to
check for valid byte sequences. Also, nobody is actually that careful. I'm
actually kind of surprised that such a check is performed. Usually the rule is
that the caller is responsible for checking. strdup doesn't return an error
for a NULL pointer. I would expect if I printf "\xc0\x80" that I will get the
two bytes c0 80 as output.
There's some danger of slippery slope here, which parts of the standard are
safe to ignore and which aren't. It's reasonable to argue it's best not to
ignore anything, but I feel pretty good about ignoring this rule as an
exception.
