Re: ncurses garbled characters redux

[Thomas Dickey]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 01:36:48PM -0700, Rich Burridge wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We have a weird one. This is on Solaris with ncurses version 6.0-20170708
> (with --with-abi-version=5 ;-) ), and Python 2.7.13.
> 
> We are seeing "garbage characters" when running the Solaris text installer
> on a physical console (either directly on bare metal or with something
> like the VirtualBox console). See the attached image.

Sun's hardware console doesn't behave the same as xterm or vt100.
I'd expect $TERM to be either "sun" or "sun-color" for that.

(A while back, Sun got in the habit of setting $TERM for their installer,
so that it would't run properly on the console, apparently assuming that
it was run on an attached serial terminal).

For what it's worth, the terminal description for "sun" does not
mention line-drawing.  (It's been quite a while since I looked at
Sun's documentation, but I probably wouldn't have overlooked that).

Also, it didn't do UTF-8.

In Unicode, ACS_HLINE would be U+2500, and the character you're showing
is (in ISO-8859-1) 226, or octal 342.

The UTF-8 for U+2500 is

        \342\224\200

So... it seems you're displaying UTF-8 on a device that supports ISO-8859-1.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net

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