printf(1) and UTF-8 multi-byte chars

[Matthias Apitz]

If you look at the two examples:

$ printf "[%-10s]\n" "xxxx?xxx"
[xxxx?xxx  ]

$ printf "[%-10s]\n" "xxxx¿xxx"
[xxxx¿xxx ]

you see that in the first two blanks are used to fill the '%-10s'
pattern, while in the second only one blank is used. For sure, the
problem/bug has todo with being '¿' a multi-byte UTF-8 char:

$ echo '¿' | od -tx1
0000000    c2  bf  0a

i.e. with "xxxx¿xxx" 8 chars plus one blank are printed to give %-10s, with 
"xxxx?xxx" 8 chars plus two blanks are printed. This means the output of
printf(1) is byte oriented and not character oriented.

Is there a way to print it like this:

[xxxx¿xxx  ]
[xxxx?xxx  ]

Thanks

	matthias
-- 
Matthias Apitz, ✉ guru at unixarea.de, http://www.unixarea.de/ +49-176-38902045
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