Re: extended ASCII characters do not show up

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Rajat Das wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am having the following problem. When I try to draw a box using the 
> box function viz. box(win,0,0), the box is drawn with + and - characters 
> ie. I get a dashed line. I do not get a smooth line as can be expected 
> if the box drawing characters from the extended ASCII were used. Also If 
> I try to print a character from the extended ASCII range(128 - 255), 
> using for instance addch(), nothing gets printed.

> This is a problem that I am facing in RedHat 9.0. I do not face this 
> problem on Slackware or Mandrake. That is, the same program compiled on 
> those machines gives smooth lines. Also characters from the extended 
> ASCII range show up on those machines.

Redhat 9.0 generally uses UTF-8 locales.   While I've seen some comments
that indicate Slackware supports them now, I'm guessing that you may be
running with UTF-8 only on Redhat.

In UTF-8, codes 128-255 are interpreted differently - they are not 
printable.

> After reading an earlier post on this list on a related topic I tried 
> using the setlocale() function but that did not help. If I set LC_ALL to 
> "C" in my .bashrc file then I do not get any lines at all, not even the 
> dashed lines.

That sounds as if you're running a program in the Linux console.
When it's set to UTF-8 mode, it ignores the vt100-style line-drawing,
and gives the same effect.  In that combination, the only way to get
line-drawing is to use libncursesw (which can write UTF-8) rather than
libncurses (which cannot).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net