Re: [bug-gawk] Exposing wcwidth(3) as a built-in function

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2017 12:14:51 -0800
> From: Eric Pruitt <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> On Fri, Dec 01, 2017 at 09:41:14PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Thanks, but doesn't this still assume UTF-8 encoding of characters?
> > If so, it's not portable to non-UTF-8 locales, right?
> 
> That is correct. By "portable" I meant that it works on the most popular
> AWK implementations although I still need to test the script on a BSD
> box. I'm not trying to reimplement setlocale or iconv.

Calling iconv from Gawk (using loadable modules, for example, or even
as an external program) is easy enough.

> UTF-8 is easy to parse, far saner than its predecessors (IMO) and
> conveniently happens to be the only encoding other "C" that I use on
> my machines.

Then IMHO your implementation is not as useful as it could be,
especially in Gawk, which is IMO supposed to insulate the programmer
from the peculiarities of the underlying platform.