On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 07:41:35AM -0400, Juan Miscaro wrote:
quoted text
> --- Paul Irofti <bulibuta@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 11:22:53AM -0400, Nick Guenther wrote:
> > > On 11/1/07, Juan Miscaro <scry_mr@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> > > > Hi gang.
> > > >
> > > > Is there any priority for having OpenBSD support UTF8?
> > > >
> > > > // peter
> > > 
> > > utf-8 isn't an OS-level thing. You need to do it in every app.
> > > Googling, the first result brings up
> > > http://osdir.com/ml/os.openbsd.ports/2004-02/msg00376.html as an
> > > example.
> > > 
> > 
> > The sad thing is that the man pages don't mention that OpenBSD's libc
> > doesn't quite support locale, multibyte/wide char conversions thus
> > Unicode.
> > 
> > E.g. if you look at mbstowcs(3) you'd say: okay, I can use that...
> > but
> > looking at the code behind it you'll see its a pure stab that does a
> > simple memcpy from chars to ints (or wchar_ts as they modernly call
> > it
> > in C99).

You would REALLY be surprised how much of a difference this `simple stub'
does... it allows us to compile *a lot* of code that helps support utf8
in ports land.

And in reality, this part of OpenBSD is C99-compliant. There's absolutely
*nothing* in the standard that says you have to support any locale except
the C locale (which we do).

If something has to be documented, it's probably that we just support
8 bit locales for now...

That said, this will eventually improve, and yes, this is a long road.
If it was only the C library, it would be rather simple...

quoted text
> 
> To get back to the practical nature of my original request, if someone
> can let me know how to write French characters in a terminal (via an
> SSH connection) I would be very grateful.  I would like to use a
> terminal emulator that uses UTF8 and I believe xterm does this but I
> can't find an OpenBSD package (or port) for it.
> 
> // juan

The xterm in OpenBSD can do it. It supports the utf8 option.

You will need an editor that supports utf8 characters as well.
Both vim and emacs do.

There are lots of programs in ports that have fairly decent level of
locale support. Heck, I can actually write japanese in OpenBSD, for
instance, and that's a *whole lot* more complicated than just french
characters.