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Date:      Thu, 29 Mar 2001 22:06:55 +0000 (UTC)
From:      naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber)
To:        freebsd-chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Unicode, 8-bit cleanliness, etc.
Message-ID:  <9a0blv$2ghl$1@kemoauc.mips.inka.de>
References:  <p05001932b6e891d8ebed@[192.168.168.205]>

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Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> wrote:

> I recently started playing with Mac OS X, which allows Unicode (UTF-8,
> AFAIK) in its path names.  Because I'm also using my trusty FreeBSD box,
> I'm wondering if there's any reason to worry about compatibility.  So,
> is FreeBSD totally 8-bit clean or are there some tarpits I should avoid?

8-bit cleanness is a given, considering that Europeans have used
various single-byte 8-bit character sets (ISO 8859, KOI, etc) on
FreeBSD for many years.  The filesystem of course doesn't care,
apart from '/' (directory separator) and '\0' (string terminator)
it doesn't assign any meaning to particular characters.

UTF-8's multi-byte nature *will* produce many cosmetic problems
(e.g. ls(1) not aligning columns properly) throughout the system.
More work on this is needed.

Note that there's a freebsd-i18n list that deals with such issues.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de


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