Re: Re: zsh - new user with questions

[Sweth Chandramouli <sweth@astaroth.nit.gwu.edu>]

On Wed, Aug 19, 1998 at 09:58:29PM +0200, Roland Jesse wrote:
> Bart Schaefer wrote:
> 
> > The actual _access_ to the file still has to use its "real" name.
> 
> Now it's getting confusing. If the completion tells me a different file
> name than the one acutally stored in the file system, I can easily imagine
> cases in which I am not sure what the command, the completion is used for,
> is going to do.
	
	but no one ever suggested that completion tell you a different name.  
what people have been discussing is completion _recognizing_ a different name, 
and completing it to the "correct" name.  basically, zsh would no longer look 
for exact matches when searching for possible completions, but would instead use 
some set of algorithms for the search.  in theory, i don't see why this would 
cause any problems, as bart shows in his example:
	
> zsh% ls STRASSE<TAB>
> 
> then zsh would complete case-insensitively and you'd see
> 
> zsh% ls Straße

	the completion tells you _exactly_ the file name that is stored in the 
system, despite your asking for the wrong one.  so long as the algorithms used 
were based on some standard translation (and so long as they were used just for 
completion--as someone else pointed out, using it for general globbing could be 
problematic), then the absolute worst result that could happen is that 
completion would, as it does now, simply not find the file for which you are 
searching--if i were using some different lang set, where ß was not considered 
the lowercase version of "SS", then the session would look like this:

zsh% ls STRASSE<TAB>
<beep>
zsh% ls STRASSE

	at which point i could slap my head, realize i was using the 
western-bulgarian charset, and try to figure out what the real spelling of the 
file was myself.
	
	(actually, that would be what would happen for iso_8859_1, in addition 
to western-bulgarian, which sees the uppercase version of ß as À (at least 
according to 

zsh% echo 'ß' | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"

	.  so, is there some easy way to view the character tables (and maybe 
even the ascii sequences that map to them) for a given language charset, from 
the command line?  how about to view the upper<->lower translation tables, or 
does it simply increment/decrement the ascii value by a certain amount and use 
whatever is returned by the new value?
	
	-- sweth.
	
-- 
Sweth Chandramouli
IS Coordinator, The George Washington University
<sweth@gwu.edu> / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F)
<a href="http://astaroth.nit.gwu.edu/~sweth/disc.html">*</a>