freebsd stable - Feb 2006 - tr(1) buggy with de_DE.ISO8859-1(5) locale?

Hi,

There is a quite nasty bug in tr(1) when using
de_DE.ISO8859-1(5) locale.

Try this please:
unsetenv LC_ALL
setenv LANG de_DE.ISO8859-1
echo v | tr a-z A-Z

I'm getting "W" as result. Shouldn't it be "V"?

Produced on (probably more versions affected):
FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE #0: Thu Jan 19 01:07:01 CET 2006

Martin

In the last episode (Feb 03), Martin said:
> There is a quite nasty bug in tr(1) when using de_DE.ISO8859-1(5)
> locale.
> 
> Try this please:
> unsetenv LC_ALL
> setenv LANG de_DE.ISO8859-1
> echo v | tr a-z A-Z
> 
> I'm getting "W" as result. Shouldn't it be "V"?
See the "tr" manpage, especially the EXAMPLES and COMPATIBILITY
sections.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com

Martin wrote:
> There is a quite nasty bug in tr(1) when using
> de_DE.ISO8859-1(5) locale.
> 
> Try this please:
> unsetenv LC_ALL
> setenv LANG de_DE.ISO8859-1
> echo v | tr a-z A-Z
> 
> I'm getting "W" as result. Shouldn't it be "V"?
(Unexpected behavior explained elsewhere in the thread.)

The correct way to change lower-case to upper-case is as follows:
echo v | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"

See tr(1) for more info.

-Jonathan

Martin <nakal@nurfuerspam.de> wrote:
 > There is a quite nasty bug in tr(1) when using
 > de_DE.ISO8859-1(5) locale.

It's not a bug.  It's perfectly POSIX-compatible.

 > unsetenv LC_ALL
 > setenv LANG de_DE.ISO8859-1
 > echo v | tr a-z A-Z
 > 
 > I'm getting "W" as result. Shouldn't it be
"V"?

No, it should be "W".

To convert lower case to upper case, use the command
"tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'" (or enumerate all letters
explicitely, like "tr abcdef ABCDEF").  Skripts that
use things like "tr a-z A-Z" are broken and need to be
fixed.

By the way:  Do not set LANG or LC_ALL, expecially for
the root user, and especially when compiling things.
Not only will tr behave in unexpected ways when used
like above, but also other things might break.  For
example, German month names appear in "ls -l", which
will break scripts that try to parse them.  Some tools
use decimal commas instead of decimal points, which
can lead to further confusion, etc.  Yes, scripts
which try to do that are broken, but they do exist.

If you only need support for German umlauts, then only
set LC_CTYPE.  That shouldn't break anything.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
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and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

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