Re: mutt crashes on utf-8 encoded headers

[Glenn Maynard <g_lutf8@xxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 05:43:30AM -0500, Thomas E. Dickey wrote:
> > Current ncurses doesn't deal with multibyte characters, so the cursor
> > position becomes desynchronized.
> 
> There are enough multibyte calls implemented in ncursesw to make this
> work.  (addstr is not one of them - but I don't see that the OP was using
> ncursesw anyway).

> I don't believe that anyone tried making it work with ncurses first.

There are 66 addstr() calls in Mutt, and I don't know what other functions
can't cope with multibyte.  Every ncurses call it's making will need to
deal with it; even basic messages may contain multibyte UTF-8 if it's in a
different language.  If a basic function like addstr doesn't support it, then
I'd assume a lot of work would be needed.

The slang patch is almost drop-in, so it's an easy stopgap until multibyte
support is in ncurses mainstream.  (I'm assuming that the "ncursesw" naming
is temporary, until it's fully implemented.)  It just needs a couple
workarounds to make it work for UTF-8.

(There may be other reasons for the UTF-8 line drawing special case; I'm
naming the one major affect I know of.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/