Egmont Koblinger wrote:
> I was reading Markus's page and found the example:
> printf("%ls\n", L"Schöne Grüße");
> and noticed that gcc always interprets the source code according to
> Latin-1.
gcc-3.4's documentation contains the following:
`-fexec-charset=CHARSET'
Set the execution character set, used for string and character
constants. The default is UTF-8. CHARSET can be any encoding
supported by the system's `iconv' library routine.
`-fwide-exec-charset=CHARSET'
Set the wide execution character set, used for wide string and
character constants. The default is UTF-32 or UTF-16, whichever
corresponds to the width of `wchar_t'. As with
`-ftarget-charset', CHARSET can be any encoding supported by the
system's `iconv' library routine; however, you will have problems
with encodings that do not fit exactly in `wchar_t'.
`-finput-charset=CHARSET'
Set the input character set, used for translation from the
character set of the input file to the source character set used
by GCC. If the locale does not specify, or GCC cannot get this
information from the locale, the default is UTF-8. This can be
overridden by either the locale or this command line option.
Currently the command line option takes precedence if there's a
conflict. CHARSET can be any encoding supported by the system's
`iconv' library routine.
and these options work fine for me.
However, these gcc options are normally not usable for portable programs.
This is because
1) For printf("%s\n", "Schöne Grüße");
Many Linux users work in an UTF-8 locale, many others work in a
pre-Unicode locale. Do you want to ship two executables, one
produced with -fexec-charset=UTF-8 and one with
-fexec-charset=ISO-8859-2 ?
2) For printf("%ls\n", L"Schöne Grüße");
On Solaris, FreeBSD and others, the wide character encoding is
locale dependent and not documented. Therefore there is no good
choice for the -fwide-exec-charset option that you could make.
The portable solution is to use gettext:
printf("%s\n", gettext ("Schoene Gruesse"));
or printf("%s\n", gettext ("Greetings"));
This works on all platforms, with all compilers, and furthermore allows
the program to be localized.
OTOH, if you limit yourself to Linux systems and don't want your
programs to be portable or internationalized, you can now use option 2.
Bruno
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
