Hi,

Jörn Reder wrote:
> [ Cut a lot. ]
>
> Locale::TextDomain misses setting the utf-8 flag on the returned string.
> If the utf-8 flag was set, Perl had converted the output to iso-8859-1 when
> printing to my iso-8859-1 terminal.

It doesn't miss setting the flag, it explicitely unsets it.  See the
documentation for Locale::Messages(3pm), function gettext().

Apart utf-8 flag advocacy or criticism: Libintl-Perl aims to be compatible
with GNU gettext _and_ libintl-perl will try to use the XS version of the
gettext family of functions if possible.  GNU gettext provides no function to
find out whether the output string is in UTF-8 or not.  Instead of making a
lucky guess I decided to always explicitely turn the flag of, because it
cannot be decided.

> Locale::TextDomain misses setting the utf-8 flag on the returned
> string. If the utf-8 flag was set, Perl had converted the output to
> iso-8859-1 when printing to my iso-8859-1 terminal.

If your terminal only understand iso-8859-1, then you should choose a
iso-8859-1 locale ...

> Is this behaviour intended, resp it's no bug but a feature I just
> don't understand?  ;)

There is a misunderstanding.  The character set information in a po file is
only used to find out the encoding of po resp. mo file.  This encoding is the
_source_ encoding for a conversion to the user-defined (via personal locale
settings) destination character set.

If your terminal expects iso-8859-1, then you should choose an iso-8859-1
locale (or set $ENV{OUPUTCHARSET} to "iso-8859-1") and everything will work
fine.  If you prefer a utf-8 locale, then your terminal should be able to
grok with it.

The real problem is that libintl-perl will only convert the character set of
translations.  When it returns the original msgids, it will leave them alone.
I would consider this a bug if the behavior of GNU gettext differs, but I
have to test it out first.

What you can do is provide an explicit po file for en_US where all msgids are
identical to the msgstrs.  Not very nice, but I really think that this would
also be necessary for the XS versions.

Regard,
Guido
--
Imperia AG, Development
Leyboldstr. 10 - D-50354 Hürth - http://www.imperia.net/

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