On 11/01/13 15:46, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 01/11/2013 06:51 AM, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
Can anyone name a system in use today that is not capable of dealing with it?
It depends on what one means by "capable". When I type the command "emacs southamerica" here's some text that I see on my remote-shell terminal window:
# A partir de entonces, San Luis establecer\u00E1 el huso horario propio de
That is, Emacs correctly infers that the file uses Latin-1, but because I prefer the LC_ALL='C' locale it displays all non-ASCII characters by using hexadecimal escape sequences. It would do the same if the file used UTF-8. I could work around the problem by using, say, the the LC_ALL='en_US.utf8' locale, but that has some undesirable side effects (it mishandles character ranges, and it's noticeably slower for some other things I do), and I'd rather not.
The main systems I use these days are Ubuntu 12.10, Fedora 17, and RHEL 6.3; these are all the latest stable versions, and they all work this way. I wouldn't be surprised if the latest OS X release worked this way too.
At least for Ubuntu 12.10 you could try LC_ALL=C.utf8 for the others maybe LC_ALL= LANG=C LC_TYPE=en_US.UTF-8.
For this particular case, the fix is simple: translate the text into English (it's an English-language database, after all). Names can be a bit trickier, but again, things are simpler (at least for this maintainer) if the commentary is in ASCII.
Fair enough, but transliterating personal names into plain ASCII is problematic! -- -=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <abbotti@mev.co.uk> )=- -=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898 FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587 )=-