Re: gawk: Wrong behavior in binary mode

[Aharon Robbins]

Greetings. Re this:

> Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:12:32 -0500
> To: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
> Cc: Aharon Robbins <address@hidden>, address@hidden,
>         address@hidden
> Subject: Re: gawk: Wrong behavior in binary mode
>
> Eli Zaretskii scripsit:
>
> > I think you are missing the fact that LC_ALL=C has broad effects other
> > than just disabling multibyte characters.  For example, it also causes
> > Gawk to speak US English when displaying messages, and use US format
> > for dates and currency.  What do I do if I want my error messages in
> > Hebrew, but need to work with raw binary data that is not a character
> > string?
>
> Quite so.  There should be some way to specify the encoding of Gawk's
> input and output files independent of the locale (IMHO, encoding the
> character encoding into the local identifier was just a botch.)

This is a POSIX botch, though, so I'm stuck.  I think iconv is the tool
of choice here but I could be wrong. I'm not an expert on this and
it's a cold, dank, ugly swamp that I'd just as soon not have to go into.

Arnold