Re: character class "alpha"

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>]

On Jul 31 16:06, Bruno Haible via Cygwin wrote:
> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > I have a problem with the c32isalpha function.
> > 
> > c32isalpha fails for the character U+FF11 FULLWIDTH DIGIT ONE,
> > because it expects the character to be an alphabetic character.
> 
> This is not a big problem. You can see in the test-c32isalpha.c file
> that this test is disabled for many platforms, in particular glibc.

Which is interesting, because I actually tried that today on glibc, and
for iswalpha (0xff11) it returns 1.  So it actually behaves as the
testcase expects.

> There's no problem with disabling it on Cygwin as well.

I'd rather make Cygwin do the same as glibc.

> > The Cygwin unicode information is automatically generated from the
> > Unicode data file UnicodeData.txt, fresh from their homepage.  iswalpha
> > in newlib is checking for the Unicode categories, using the expression:
> > 
> >     return cat == CAT_LC || cat == CAT_Lu || cat == CAT_Ll || cat == CAT_Lt
> >           || cat == CAT_Lm || cat == CAT_Lo
> > 	  || cat == CAT_Nl // Letter_Number
> > 	  ;
> > 
> > with CAT_foo being equivalent to Unicode category foo.
> > 
> > Per UnicodeData.txt, ff11 is of category Nd, so it's a digit, not an
> > alphabetic character.
> 
> This is not wrong. However, see the comments in the generator of the
> gnulib tables:
> 
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=lib/gen-uni-tables.c;h=0dceedc06cd72f886807fd575a2c4dba99cd147a;hb=HEAD#l5789
> 
>    /* Consider all the non-ASCII digits as alphabetic.
>       ISO C 99 forbids us to have them in category "digit",
>       but we want iswalnum to return true on them.  */
> 
> Likewise in the generator of the glibc tables:
> 
> https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=localedata/unicode-gen/unicode_utils.py;h=5af03113a2f1f063769752ea426fcaf6f6ba9e95;hb=HEAD#l274
> 
> The original comment (from 2000) was:
> 
>   /* SUSV2 gives us some freedom for the "digit" category, but ISO C 99
>      takes it away:
>      7.25.2.1.5:
>         The iswdigit function tests for any wide character that corresponds
>         to a decimal-digit character (as defined in 5.2.1).
>      5.2.1:
>         the 10 decimal digits 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
>    */
>   return (ch >= 0x0030 && ch <= 0x0039);
> 
> The question is: In which category do you put these non-ASCII digits?
> "print" and "graph", sure. But other than that? "punct" or "alnum"?
> "punct" seems wrong. If you, like me, decide to put them in "alnum",
> then you they need to be in "alpha" or "digit" (per POSIX
> https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/iswalnum.html ).
> But ISO C 23 § 7.4.1.5 + § 5.2.1 does not allow them in category "digit".

Thanks for the description.  It was clear to me that they don't belong
into the ISO C digit category, but other than that...

So, if we change the expression in iswalpha_l to something like

  return cat == CAT_LC || cat == CAT_Lu || cat == CAT_Ll || cat == CAT_Lt
      || cat == CAT_Lm || cat == CAT_Lo
      || cat == CAT_Nl // Letter_Number
      /* Also all digits not allowed to be called digits per ISO C 99 */
      || (cat == CAT_Nd && !(c >= (wint_t)'0' && c <= (wint_t)'9'));
      ;

we're good?


Thanks,
Corinna