Hi,
At Fri, 9 Nov 2001 18:28:27 +0000 (GMT),
Markus Kuhn wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Daniel Yacob wrote:
> > Is there a way to detect if the terminal that a script is running in
> > can display UTF-8 text?
>
> No, not by communicating with the terminal directly. There is
> neither a practical method that doesn't involve asking the user
> for what she can see, nor is there a recommendable formal
> standard solution.
I think it would be helpful if terminal itself sets some environmental
variable for this purpose. Here is an example of such variables.
TERMENCODING
This would be set by the terminal and will be one of followings:
ASCII, ISO-8859-*, KOI8-*, EUC-*, ISO-2022-*, UTF-*, TIS-620, VISCII,
and so on.
TERMENCODINGINFO
This would be set by the terminal and give additional information
about implement level of encodings. This would be a list of features
separated by comma. This information does not imply that the used
fonts actually includes needed glyphs.
When TERMENCODING=UTF-*
C1 : combining characters level 1
C2 : combining characters level 2
DB : doublewidth characters
D2 : doublewidth characters (EastAsianAmbiguous = 2 columns)
BD : bidi
Pn : page n support. (n = 0 (=BMP), 1 (=SMP), 2 (=SIP), ...)
and so on.
When TERMENCODING=EUC-JP
12 : JIS X 0212 support
KA : JIS X 0201 Kana support
TERMENCODING2022
This would be set by the terminal and give information on ISO-2022
charset selection support. This ould be a list of features separated
by comma.
names of charsets: supported charsets
Gn : usage of Gn (n = 0, 1, 2, or 3)
Gx : usage of Gx (x = R or L)
These information can be used to set LANG variable in .bashrc and so on.
For example, we want to set LANG=C when the terminal cannot display
our favorite languages.
Are there any better way than environmental variables? A problem
of environmental variables is that it is inherited into terminals
which doesn't set the above variables.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
