Re: FAQ, German Umlauts

[Uli Zappe <uli@tallowcross.uni-frankfurt.de>]

Peter Stephenson wrote:

> The locale business is the standard way of telling the system
> what is a character and what isn't (and all sorts of similar
> things).
[...]
> It sounds like NEXTSTEP doesn't have that.  Try looking in the
> `ctype' manual page to see if there is anything corresponding to
> it

I did: No, there isn't. I.e. actually there is an *object class*  
for that purpose, but obviously zsh doesn't make use of *that*.

> Zsh doesn't even decide; the system does and it seems to be
> getting it wrong.

But zsh is the *only* program with this problem on NEXTSTEP; so it  
can't be as simple as "zsh is right, but NEXTSTEP is wrong"... :-(  
perl, for instance, works perfectly well.

> The old zsh, so far as I remember, didn't even have the locale
> mechanism, so is unlikely to be able to do non-ASCII characters.
> Even a reasonable attempt at 8-bit characters is fairly new.

zsh 2.51 *can* deal perfectly with lower case Umlauts, as I said before.

> To clarify, zsh doesn't need the locale system
> either, it just supports it if it is available.

Does this locale system consist of only the file /usr/lib/locale  
(so that I simply could install such a file), or is there a  
corresponding program that's necessary?

> The alternative is Wolfgang Hukriede's suggestion of passing
> through all characters.  That's dangerous in general, so it would
> have to be an option.

Maybe it's not necessary to really pass thru *all* characters; I  
can't judge, though.

Anyway, what do I have to do to make this option being implemented  
in future versions of zsh?


                Bye
                        Uli

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Uli Zappe               E-Mail: uli@tallowcross.uni-frankfurt.de
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