morning Thomas, Hans-Christoph, and list,
On 2006-11-30 03:20:56, Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@eds.org appears to have written:
locales is the library and tool that handles that stuff, IIRC. You'll want to look into the env vars LANG, LC_ALL, etc. I think that's supposed to be system-wide, but with all those grabbag distros based on the Linux kernel, you never know who implemented what and how in their bit.
afaik, locale.h doesn't handle any character set translation; it just ensures that isalpha() & co. work sensibly. there's also no guarantee that the current input and/or display modes will conform to the value of $LANG, but i agree that $LANG is probably the safest information source for the user's preferred encoding.
On Nov 29, 2006, at 4:37 PM, Thomas Grill wrote:
Is there an API function to query this encoding
i don't know which function(s) to use, but you might also look at the "registry" and "encoding" fields of the currently selected X font.
is there a system function to convert from/to UTF-8?
i don't think there's anything like a universally applicable system function guaranteed to work everywhere, but i use librecode for character set translation on linux. i've also heard good reports about iconv, but have never used it directly myself.
marmosets, Bryan