Re: Are completion and prompt expansion 8-bit clean?

[Zefram <zefram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alain Caron wrote:
>Subject: Are completion and prompt expansion 8-bit clean?

In one sense, yes: they can handle 8-bit data.  In fact, they can handle
arbitrary binary data.  In another sense, no: they do not treat all 8-bit
data as printable, even when the display will interpret them as Latin-1
or whatever.  Unfortunately, Unix does not provide a way to find out
what characters are printable on a particular display device, so we have
to choose in the source which characters zsh will treat as printable.
No choice can be right for all displays; the current choice is a safe one.

The bug is in Unix; please send the bug report to K.Thompson and
D.Ritchie, twenty years ago.  This bug will be fixed in a future OS[1].

-zefram

[1] If I ever find the time to write the OS I've been planning, this is
one of the things that will be fixed.  Character set and printability
are a function of the tty.