On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 05:56:20AM +0000, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> I prefer the \M- form because it gives you some clue what you should do
> to generate the equivalent value from the keyboard.

Fair enough -- let's just leave it alone, then.

As for my patch in the grandparent email, I noticed some problems with
it:  the manpage for mbrtowc() says that the state of the mbstate_t
object is undefined after the function returns -1, so the code should
reset it to a known state.  When the function returns -2, it means the
code scanned to the end of the string without finding the end of a wide
character, so perhaps we should treat all the remaining characters as
invalid?  I'm not certain that's the correct thing to do, so I'll leave
the code handling -2 the same way as -1 for now.  Finally, I wasn't
setting the right visible width for the \M-... string (I had mistakenly
hardwired it to "1").

While twiddling these things I noticed a couple other things that I
think could be improved:

1. It looks to me like the code in wcs_nicechar() that calls
wcswidth(&c, 1) could really just call wcwidth(c), right?  If not,
what am I missing?

2. The code in mb_niceformat() calls strlen() on the "fmt" string
returned by wcs_nicechar(), but it seems to me that it could just use
the width that wcs_nicechar() returned, right?

Attached is an updated version of my patch that fixes the aforementioned
bugs and implements the 2 improvements.

..wayne..