[Freeipa-devel] not ascii, not utf-8, what's a parser supposed to do?

[Howard Chu]

John Dennis wrote:
> I've run into a small problem with xgettext. By default xgettext expects 
> all strings in an input file to be encoded in ascii. It will also allow 
> you to override that by specifying the strings in the input file are utf-8.

Do you ever expect to run this stuff on IBM mainframes (i.e., systems using
EBCDIC or some other non-ASCII-related character set) ?

> Can you think of another way to express the offending string such that 
> it doesn't trigger the non-ascii error? The only thing I could think of 
> and get to work was this:
> 
> SAFE_STRING_PATTERN='%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c' 
> % \
> (40,94,40,0,124,10,124,13,124,32,124,58,124,60,41,124,91,0,10,13,128,45,255,93,43,124,91,32,93,43,36,41)
> 
> Which is pretty unreadable, but with sufficient comments could be 
> acceptable.

I had to use similar hacks when porting OpenSSL to z/OS. It kinda sucks, but
it has the virtue of being completely independent of the machine's language
settings. And frankly, it doesn't take too much explanation in the comments to
be understandable.

-- 
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
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