Re: UTF-8 printf string formating problem

[Chris Down]

Jan Novak writes:
> printf string format counts bytes instead of chars, which leads to
> broken output

According to POSIX, printf's field width control is strictly in bytes,
not characters.[0]

> field width:
>     An optional string of decimal digits to specify a minimum field
>     width.  For an output field, if the converted value has fewer
>     bytes than the field width, it shall be padded on the left (or
>     right, if the left-adjustment flag ( '-' ), described below, has
>     been given) to the field width.

By that definition, this is expected behaviour. You will also find this
behaviour in pretty much any POSIX-y tool that uses format strings
(mawk/gawk do it).

I don't have much of an opinion on whether this behaviour is right or
wrong in the context of bash, but if this behaviour is changed, I think
it should be done under another format character, rather than changing
%s (or changing behaviour when not in POSIX-compliance mode).

0: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap05.html

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