Re: g_locale_from_utf8 and minus sign

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu> wrote:
> 
>> I judged it a devel issue because it raised a question about
>> whether glib was doing the right thing in not converting U+2212 to
>> "the nearest" character in ISO-8859-1, 0x2D.  However, I accept an
>> offlist response from Dom Lachowicz, namely that these are
>> different characters and so glib is right not to convert.
> 
> This is really a question about iconv behaviour, since glib doesn't do
> its own conversion. And I guess when you as the iconv developers about
> this, they
> will tell you that iconv is not about guessing the 'nearest'
> character, but rather
> about recoding characters from one coded character set to another. A
> hyphen is not the same character as a minus, thus iconv won't recode
> the latter to the former, even if they look similar on paper. I agree
> that it would be more useful
> if iconv _would_ do what you expected it to do...

The glibc implementation of iconv actually does that if you nicely ask it to:

$ echo − | iconv -f utf8 -t latin1
iconv: illegal input sequence at position 0
$ echo − | iconv -f utf8 -t latin1//translit
-

Should glib try the //translit version first?  I think so.  That's what I made
vte do, and filed this bug about it:

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502951

behdad

> Matthias