Re: R/GNU S: up with a couple hitches...

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 12:44:41AM -0400, idunham@lavabit.com wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 08:19:17PM -0400, idunham@lavabit.com wrote:
> >> BTW, Rich, here's what that page says about iconv:
> >> | The R usage requires iconv to be able to translate between "latin1"
> >> | and "UTF-8", to recognize "" (as the current encoding) and "ASCII",
> >> | and to translate to and from the Unicode wide-character formats
> >> | "UCS-[24][BL]E"
> >> How much of this should musl support?
> >
> > I've never heard of using "" (blank string) to mean "the current
> > encoding". If it's documented usage for glibc, it must be buried
> > somewhere in the docs; it's definitely not a standard usage. The
> > standard way to get the locale's encoding is nl_langinfo(CODESET); on
> > any good implementation it will be accepted as an argument to
> > iconv_open.
> Here's what the glibc docs say
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Standard-Locales.html#Standard-Locales):
> ===
> The only locale names you can count on finding on all operating systems
> are these three standard ones:
> 
> "C"
>     This is the standard C locale. The attributes and behavior it provides
> are specified in the ISO C standard. When your program starts up, it
> initially uses this locale by default.
> "POSIX"
>     This is the standard POSIX locale. Currently, it is an alias for the
> standard C locale.
> ""
>     The empty name says to select a locale based on environment variables.
> See Locale Categories.
> ===
> Not that they accurately represent facts outside glibc!

Those are _locale_ names. Nothing to do with charset names passed to
iconv.

Rich