Re: [PATCH] Index of element after width of characters

[Sebastian Gniazdowski <sgniazdowski@gmail.com>]

On 27 October 2015 at 22:20, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
> I do find this to be a pretty highly
> specialized operation, though, and I'm not sure I like the idea of
> using up more of our limited number of remaining single-character flag
> letters for it.

I think CJK users need the patch, because with letters that vary in
width things are not what they seem, e.g. $COLUMNS is not what it
seems, any calculation "I will now skip one char to avoid wrapping of
text" is pointless, as char can have width 1, 2, and maybe more. It's
weird to me that no one complaint, wonder how Asian users code scripts
that do some pagination or other formatting of text. It might seem
that the patch is specialized but on the other hand it's fundamental.

I've counted actual flags, there are 42 of them, so there seems to be
room for 10 of them (2*26 letters of English alphabet), 8 with my two
patches. That might be not much. Plus symbols it's more, maybe this
helps. I could use "-" and "," for the patches, it's quite mnemonic –
it would look like ${(-:10:)a}, ${(,:9:)a} - the number is a limit,
"-" is before limit, "," is after limit. Thought about "," and ".",
but "." feels more like "at limit", while "," as "after limit". Minus
feels like "before limit" so "-", "," it's quite fine, even better
than "x", "y".

>> The code works, however not in the test that I commit. Wonder why it
>> works in scripts and at prompt but not in the test?
>
> Did you make sure that the LANG and or LC_* etc. environment variables
> are set correctly in the test script?  Also this test should probably
> be appended to D07multibyte rather than have its own new file.  (That
> would ensure that LANG etc. are properly set, too.)  I don't find a
> test of the (m) flag anywhere in Test/*.ztst either, for that matter
> -- hard to decide if this belongs in D04 or D07 but I tend to think
> the latter.

Thanks for feedback I'll dig into this today.

Best regards,
Sebastian Gniazdowski