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in reply to Re: Printing the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (U05D0) kills script?
in thread Printing the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (U05D0) kills script?

If the output is sent to a file, then it is all there. Same as when I run the script in an xemacs shell (see above). It definitely seems to be something related to xterm and not Perl. I'm beginning to think that xterm thinks certain byte squences are meant to be terminal commands (see my latest reply to kennethk). Maybe it is a pre-Unicode days "feature" with unintended consequences in multi-byte character world?

I very much like the idea of confirming the xterm behavior with a short C program. Good lateral thinking. Thanks!

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Re^3: Printing the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (U05D0) kills script?
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Mar 08, 2011 at 21:01 UTC

    I'm on completely unknown (to me) ground here now, but do xterm's retain the old-fashioned serial port configuration parameters?

    What I'm getting at is that it used to be possible to configure terminals for 7-bit or 8-bit; odd/even/no parity etc.

    If you sent unicode to a terminal that was configured to expect 7-bit input, it might strip the 8th bit. And byte value \220 (decimal 144) suddenly becomes ascii 16 which is right in amongst the device control characters often used for X-on/X-off and similar. (It's not one of those two, but who knows what others there were back in the day?)


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