Re: [Bug-wget] [Bug-Wget][BUG] Progress bar does not support multibyte characters

[Tim Rühsen]

Am Samstag, 30. August 2014, 09:23:08 schrieb Darshit Shah:
> Earlier this year, I implemented a new, more concise form of the
> progress bar. However, I've just been given a bug report regarding the
> same, which I was unable to fix.
> 
> The currently implemented progress bar shows only upto 15 characters
> of the URL. In case of longer URLs, we scroll the filename like a
> ticker. For selecting the 15 characters, wget copies 15 bytes from the
> string into the progress bar. This method fails on URLs containing
> multibyte characters. In this scenario, the progress bar happens to be
> very jittery since the string lengths are very varying.
> 
> I am trying to find a solution where we can select a substring which
> is n columns large from a given string of potentially multibyte
> characters. If someone knows how to and could implement a fix, it
> would be truly great!

Hi Darshit,

your are talking about UTF-8 strings ('multibyte' could also be UCS2/4 or 
something else).

UTF-8 strings can't be split at an arbitrary byte, only between so-called code 
points. While you could use a library to handle that, an own function is not 
complicated - UTF-8 is a very straight-forward format. Of course you can find 
tested (GPL) source code if you search, maybe even the GNU Lib contains 
functions for that purpose (at least I wouldn't be suprised).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 for a description.

Tim