GNU bug report logs - #17196
multibyte: printf: %s counts bytes instead of characters

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From: Bob Proulx <bob <at> proulx.com>
To: 17196 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Cc: Jan Novak <jn <at> turbo.sk>
Subject: bug#17196: UTF-8 printf string formating  problem
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2014 12:24:47 -0600

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Yes printf follows the C standard which only considers bytes.
> ...
> I don't think we'd be able to change the current operation of printf
> due to backwards compat reasons? Though we might be able to somehow leverage
> the existing multibyte character aware alignment/truncation code in:
> http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=gl/lib/mbsalign.c;hb=HEAD

Dan Douglas pointed out in the corresponding discussion in bug-bash
that ksh uses the L modifier.

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2014-04/msg00021.html

  Dan Douglas wrote:
  > ksh93 already has this feature using the "L" modifier:
  > 
  > ksh -c "printf '%.3Ls\n' $'\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605'"
  > ★★★

At least there is prior art for it.

Bob

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