Re: The C locale

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 05:59:11PM +0100, Andy Koppe wrote:
>Trying to reply to Tuomo Valkonen's post about locale issues, I got
>rather confused about the C locale. The manual and the POSIX standard
>say that it supports ASCII only, so in theory anything above 0x7F
>should be rejected. In practice though, both Cygwin 1.5 and 1.7 do
>support characters above 0x7F in the C locale, which could be quite
>useful. Trouble is, they do so rather inconsistenly.
>
>Both in 1.5 and 1.7, the mb conversion functions treat such characters
>as ISO-8859-1. In other words, conversion between chars and wchars are
>simple casts (except that wchars above 0xFF can't be converted). This
>makes some sense.
>
>Filename handling is different though. Cygwin 1.5 translates filenames
>according to the system's ANSI codepage. I guess the inconsistency
>with the mb functions didn't really matter, as the mb functions were
>pretty much useless anyway, and supporting the system codepage was
>more important.
>
>So, with Cygwin 1.7, I'd have expected filename handling in the C
>locale to either use ISO-8859-1 for consistency with the mb functions,
>or the ANSI codepage for compatibility with 1.5. In actual fact
>though, it uses UTF-8.
>
>Is this on purpose? If so, shouldn't the multibyte conversions
>functions in the C locale use UTF-8 as well?

Since Cygin has a clear system that it is supposed to be emulating,
the real question is "What does Linux do?"

cgf

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