Re: Feature request: multibyte user-full-name

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <address@hidden>, AIDA Shinra <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello,
> user-full-name might contain non-ASCII characters. For example,
> pw_gecos is encoded in UTF-8 on Darwin.

> No technical problems exist except in which coding system should Emacs
> decode the username. We have three options:

> 1. Introduce something like directory-system-coding-system and guess
> it in set-locale-environment.

> 2. Apply file-name-coding-system and pray that it works.

> 3. Hardcode for each platform.

Why do you think that pw_gecos is related to something like
directory or file name?

Anyway, as far as a system allows users to switch locale, I
think, pw_gecos must adopt locale-independent encoding, thus
the possible encoding is one of UTF-*.  And, considering
backward compatibility, it should be UTF-8.  Then, how about
we always decode it by utf-8 (only if it contains a byte
with MSB set) while falling back to locale-coding-system
(invalid utf-8 sequence is found), and see if that works on
any systems?   How does GNU/Linux encode it?

By the way, does the mis-decoding of user-full-name lead to
any serious error?

---
Kenichi Handa
address@hidden