Re: date zh_TW.Big5 +%P

[Abel Cheung]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 00:21:29 -0800, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
> Here's the original bug report:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-03/msg00010.html

About the bug, it is definitely not related to translation. date is taking
glibc definition for %p and %P format, not from po file at all. However,
there is no problem in glibc definition as well. I have about 70%
confidence this problem comes from the evil tolower() call in
lib/strftime.c, which failed to handle some particular multibyte charsets --
those including ASCII in byte range. Big5 is such a charset.

The problematic character reporter talk about is:
%p: \xa4\x57
%P: \xa4\x77

And tolower("\x57") = \x77. But even if this is true,
I'm not sure how can it be solved; probably converting string into
some charset known not to contain ASCII for multibyte char (such as
UTF-8) before tolower()? I guess this can be a workaround, but not
such about the cost of such hack.


> > and the original mailing list for zh_TW seems to be broken so I
> > can't even contact zh_TW team. That means I'd need to bypass
> > Translation Project just for once.
> 
> Ouch!  Let's try to get the Translation Project working instead; we
> shouldn't be bothering upstream maintainers for this sort of thing.
> Please write to <address@hidden> and explain the problem
> with the zh_TW mailing list and/or team.  They should be able to fix
> things for you.  Thanks.

OK, I'll contact them.

Abel