bug#20114: tr does not support multibyte characters in the first argument

[Bruno Haible]

POSIX [1] specifies that the recognition of characters in 'tr' depends on
the environment variables LANG, etc.

But trying to replace a multibyte character by another character does not
work:

$ echo $LANG
de_DE.UTF-8
$ enspace=`printf '\u2002'`
$ echo -n "X${enspace}Y" | tr "${enspace}" ' ' | od -t x1
0000000 58 20 20 20 59
0000005

Expected output would be:
$ echo -n "X${enspace}Y" | tr "${enspace}" ' ' | od -t x1
0000000 58 20 59
0000003

With 'sed' it works:

$ echo -n "X${enspace}Y" | sed -e "s/${enspace}/ /g" | od -t x1
0000000 58 20 59
0000003

Bruno

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/tr.html