Am 20. Oktober 2019 um 15:44 Uhr schrieb "Andrew Janke":
So it sounds like we need to find an authoritative answer for which
Octave version had pretty much switched over to UTF-8 internal
representations, and wrap all this Unicode conversion stuff inside a
ver_less_than() test?
Unless someone knows this offhand, might be kind of hard since Octave
didn't used to be formal about discussing how it handled character
encodings in chars.
Unfortunately, I have to agree again. I think it is very hard to pinpoint an
exact version for which we suddenly switched to use UTF-8 consistently. In
earlier versions, one had to use a bunch of different work-arounds to use
non-ASCII characters in different situations - most of them not compatible to
each other. And for some situations, there just was no work-around at all.
I think that the transition to using UTF-8 more or less consistently still
isn't over. If I remember correctly, it started around or shortly after the
work on bug #49222 - so about 3 years ago.
Maybe, we could "define" the change for bug #43099 to be the decisive step for
this particular bug (displaying strings in the command window). So if we really want to
keep the old work-around (I'm not sure I want to vote for it since it breaks other
things), I'd vote for disabling it for Octave version 4.4 and later.