New: Please document behaviour of iconv(3) when input is untranslatable
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217059
Bug ID: 217059
Summary: Please document behaviour of iconv(3) when input is
untranslatable
Product: Documentation
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
Status: NEW
Severity: normal
Priority: P1
Component: man-pages
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
Regression: No
See https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=29913
The issue is that the man page does not fully reflect the behaviour of glibc's iconv. The man page says:
The conversion can stop for four reasons:
1. An invalid multibyte sequence is encountered in the input. In this
case, it sets errno to EILSEQ and
returns (size_t) -1. *inbuf is left pointing to the beginning of the
invalid multibyte sequence.
The phrase "An invalid multibyte sequence is encountered in the input" is confusing, because it suggests to me (and other readers, see the bug above!) that it refers only to the validity of the input per se (e.g. a non-UTF-8 sequence in input purporting to be UTF-8).
However, according to the original author of the man page, Bruno Haible (see the bug above), it also refers to input that cannot be translated to the desired output encoding; and indeed, glibc's iconv returns EILSEQ when the input cannot be translated, even though it is valid.
Please clarify the man page to reflect this behaviour. On the one hand, it is confusing and surprising when compared to the POSIX standard (again, for this reader and others); on the other hand, it is useful (because it enables untranslatable input to be detected).
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[Bug 217059] Please document behaviour of iconv(3) when input is untranslatable
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217059
--- Comment #1 from Alejandro Colomar ([email protected]) --- Would you mind sending a patch according to the ./CONTRIBUTING file in the repo?
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[Bug 217059] Please document behaviour of iconv(3) when input is untranslatable
In reply to [email protected]https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217059
Alejandro Colomar ([email protected]) changed:
What |Removed |Added
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Status|NEW |NEEDINFO
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[Bug 217059] Please document behaviour of iconv(3) when input is untranslatable
In reply to [email protected]https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217059
--- Comment #2 from Reuben Thomas ([email protected]) --- I've sent a patch.
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