Re: UTF-8 and 8-bit settings

[Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>]

Daniel Qarras wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was about to test zsh-4.3.2 to see how UTF-8 support is working but I
> noticed the following lines in my ~/.zshrc. Any ideas are they ok when
> trying to use UTF-8?
> 
> # Enable ISO-8859-1 support
> setopt PRINT_EIGHT_BIT
> stty cs8

cs8 is good: that means the terminal will pass each byte in full, which
you will need.  (This is at the low-level terminal interface which
doesn't know about multibyte characters.)

The PRINT_EIGHT_BIT option is really a fallback.  The shell should
work out based on the correct UTF-8 rules whether a character is
printable or not without PRINT_EIGHT_BIT.  If it's turned on, it will
simply shrug its shoulders if it doesn't recognise a character and print
it anyway.  So you should have better results if you turn it off.
If you don't there's a bug or a setting wrong somewhere.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070


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