Edit File: README.multibyte
Fri Jun 3 12:20:17 IDT 2005 ============================ As noted in the NEWS file, as of 3.1.5, gawk uses character values instead of byte values for `index', `length', `substr' and `match'. This works in multibyte and unicode locales. Wed Jun 18 16:47:31 IDT 2003 ============================ Multibyte locales can cause occasional weirdness, in particular with ranges inside brackets: /[....]/. Something that works great for ASCII will choke for, e.g., en_US.UTF-8. One such program is test/gsubtst5.awk. By default, the test suite runs with LC_ALL=C and LANG=C. You can change this by doing (from a Bourne-style shell): $ GAWKLOCALE=some_locale make check Then the test suite will set LC_ALL and LANG to the given locale. As of this writing, this works for en_US.UTF-8, and all tests pass except gsubtst5. For the normal case of RS = "\n", the locale is largely irrelevant. For other single byte record separators, using LC_ALL=C will give you much better performance when reading records. Otherwise, gawk has to make several function calls, *per input character* to find the record terminator. You have been warned.