Fails to recognize UTF-8 locale

[Egmont Koblinger]

Forwarding from https://askubuntu.com/q/1144804/398785

The command "LC_ALL=en_IN.UTF-8 snap list" (assuming the terminal is set to UTF-8) prints green ticks in the "Publisher" column, as expected.

The command "LC_ALL=en_IN snap list" prints green asterisks instead. Expected: green ticks, just as before.

Both locales are UTF-8, as confirmed for the latter one by "LC_ALL=en_IN locale charmap"

I assume UTF-8 support is detected by searching for the substring "UTF-8" in the locale related environment variables, which is bad practice.

In order to detect UTF-8, the equivalent of the "locale charmap" command should be executed, that is, setlocale(...) followed by nl_langinfo(CODESET).

snapd version 2.38+19.04 on Ubuntu 19.04.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

See also bug 1830052 for a related issue.

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

I agree this is a bug. cost/benefit-wise though it doesn't make sense for us to fix it... getting nl_langinfo to work properly everywhere would be a nightmare, even if it were already in Go.

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

(as a workaround note that --unicode=always works)