On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 9:52 AM, Ronald Fischer wrote: > I have a file X which contains ASCII text, but also in some lines German > umlaut characters. The file is classified as: > > $ file X > X: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF line terminators > > If I grep the file using, say, > > $ grep . X >Y > > (i.e. select every non-empty line and write the result to Y), this works > fine, if LANG is set to one of: UTF-8, C, C.de_DE, C.en_EN, en_EN, > de_DE. > > However, if LANG is set to C.UTF-8, two things happen: > > - grep classifies the file as binary file and produces the error message > "Binary file X matches" > > - Both the grepped lines (i.e. in our example the non-empty lines) AND > the error message end up in the standard output (i.e. in file Y). > > IMO, there are several problems with this: > > 1. It's hard to see, why an umlaut character makes the file X binary > under encoding C.UTF-8, but not under encoding UTF-8 or C.en_EN
Only one of these, "UTF-8", specifies an *encoding*. Further, I don't think just "UTF-8" or "C.en_EN" are valid locale specifiers. You can read more about how Cygwin handles locales here: https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-locale.html Certainly, if you set something like LANG="C.UTF-8" it will use UTF-8 to decode the text in the file and, failing that, treat it as binary. If you know it's ISO-8859-1 you can use either LANG= or LC_CTYPE="C.ISO-8859-1". Or, if you know the language, you should be able to use LC_CTYPE="de_DE". Each language+territory has a default encoding associated with it. For German I think it is one of the ISO-8859-* variants. Or you can use the variant "de_DE@euro" which forces ISO-8859-15 which includes the euro symbol, among other possibilities. So I think your main problem here is just not specifying your locale correctly. > 2. If grep classifies a file as binary, I think the desired behaviour > would be to NOT produce any output, unless the -a flag has been > supplied. > > 3. If grep writes a message "Binary file ... matches", this message > should go to stderr, not stdout. The stdout is supposed to contain only > a subset of the input lines. I would tend to agree with this, but this is normal behavior of grep (on Linux too), so I would take it up with the authors of grep. Best, Erik -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
