Hello, I’ve tried to find someone else using OpenBSD in various places for a while now, but with no success, so I’m hoping someone will read this.

I’m wondering what your output is from file(1) on a file you know has text encoded as UTF-8.

On my system (7.3-stable) the output is “Non-ISO extended-ASCII text”, and I’m trying to figure out if this is how it should be, or if I did something wrong setting up the system.

So, if you have a computer with OpenBSD and a minute to spare, could you try running file(1) on a UTF-8 file and see if it identifies it as UTF-8 or “Non-ISO extended-ASCII text”?

Thanks in advance

  • @tycho
    2•1 year ago

    Yep I have the same result so most likely you didn’t do anything wrong. My VPS on openbsd.amsterdam shows this and my laptop does too.

    • @pmkOP
      2•1 year ago

      Aha, I understand, thank you! file(1) might not be utf8 aware yet then.

      • @tycho
        1•1 year ago

        I explored the source of file(1) and the part to determine file types of text file seems to be in text.c: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr.bin/file/text.c?rev=1.3&content-type=text/plain

        And especially this part:

        static int
text_try_test(const void *base, size_t size, int (*f)(u_char))
{
	const u_char	*data = base;
	size_t		 offset;

	for (offset = 0; offset < size; offset++) {
		if (!f(data[offset]))
			return (0);
	}
	return (1);
}

const char *
text_get_type(const void *base, size_t size)
{
	if (text_try_test(base, size, text_is_ascii))
		return ("ASCII");
	if (text_try_test(base, size, text_is_latin1))
		return ("ISO-8859");
	if (text_try_test(base, size, text_is_extended))
		return ("Non-ISO extended-ASCII");
	return (NULL);
}

        So file(1) is not capable of saying if a file is UTF-8 right now. There is some other file (/etc/magic) which can help to determine if a text file is UTF-7 or UTF-8-EBCDIC because those need a BOM but as you said UTF-8 does not need a BOM. So it looks like we are stuck here :)

        • @pmkOP
          1•1 year ago

          Thank you. At least I know now that it’s the expected output of utf-8 files, that’s good to know. Thank you again.

        • z3bra
          1•1 year ago

          Which is ironic, given that OpenBSD only supports the UTF-8 encoding :)

          • @tycho
            1•1 year ago

            Yes it looks like utf8 is a first-class citizen but really it is ASCII which is 100% supported. From the FAQ:

            The OpenBSD base system fully supports the ASCII character set and encoding, and partially supports the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set.