Working with UTF-8 in the kernel [LWN.net]

Working with UTF-8 in the kernel

Posted Mar 29, 2019 14:54 UTC (Fri) by mina86 (guest, #68442)
In reply to: Working with UTF-8 in the kernel by smurf
Parent article: Working with UTF-8 in the kernel

There's also the curious case of lc(ẞ) = ß but uc(ß) = SS. Or sigma having two lower case forms. I anticipate a world of pain and kernel devs will have only themselves to blame. ;)

to post comments

Working with UTF-8 in the kernel

Posted Mar 30, 2019 4:27 UTC (Sat) by gps (subscriber, #45638) [Link] (1 responses)

Nah, that world of pain already exists. Today it is distributed among umpteen different application and library implementations that differ.

What's one more? Some of the above could even go away after this in some system designs.

Working with UTF-8 in the kernel

Posted Mar 31, 2019 14:41 UTC (Sun) by mina86 (guest, #68442) [Link]

> Nah, that world of pain already exists. Today it is distributed among umpteen different application and library implementations that differ.

That may be so but I'd rather my Samba server crashed than my kernel oopsed or executed malicious code because Unicode was handled incorrectly. Just like putting HTTP server inside the kernel wasn't a good idea, I'm not yet convinced that putting Unicode handling is.

Working with UTF-8 in the kernel

Posted Apr 8, 2019 6:24 UTC (Mon) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link] (1 responses)

If only more people were as reasonable as Irish who changed the Gaelic alphabet to be compatible with typewriters (changing there accentuated laters with combinations of naked letters, like gh) and therefore now don't have any problem like this ...

Working with UTF-8 in the kernel

Posted Apr 11, 2019 20:57 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well if you do this, aren't you going eventually to end up with just one letter in your alphabet? Okay, I'm being facetious, but this happened to the Roman alphabet in the ?1400s, when printing arrived. Pre-printing, the written English alphabet had a fair few more letters than 26. I'm not sure of the details, but at least one example is the replacement of thorn (looks like the Yen symbol) with Y, hence all the signs "Ye Olde Coffee Shop".

Cheers,
Wol