[CCing bug-gnulib]
Rich Felker wrote:
> I don't think the '*' has anything to do with it being a bullet
> character. It's just the implementation-defined replacement character
> musl's iconv uses.
Correct.
> I would guess the code in bison and coreutils printf is assuming the
> non-conforming glibc behavior for iconv of returning an error if a
> character from the input is not exactly representable in the output,
> rather than making replacements and returning the number of inexact
> conversions made.
Yes and no. The code is not making assumptions about a particular iconv()
implementation. But it needs to distinguish two categories of replacements
done by iconv():
- those that are harmless (for example when replacing a Unicode TAG
character U+E00xx with an empty output),
- those that are better not presented to the user, if the programmer has
specified a fallback (for example, replacing all non-ASCII characters
with NUL, '?', or '*').
The standards don't help in making the distinction.
Therefore whether you consider said glibc and libiconv behaviour as
"non-conforming" or not is irrelevant.
I have now adjusted the code to handle musl libc better.
Bruno
