hgonzalez@gmail.com writes:
> http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=649
> The last explains why they do not consider it a bug:
> ISO C99 requires for %.*s to only write complete characters that fit below
> the
> precision number of bytes. If you are using say UTF-8 locale, but ISO-8859-1
> characters as shown in the input file you provided, some of the strings are
> not valid UTF-8 strings, therefore sprintf fails with -1 because of the
> encoding error. That's not a bug in glibc.
Yeah, that was about the position I thought they'd take.
So the bottom line here is that we're best off to avoid %.*s because
it may fail if the string contains data that isn't validly encoded
according to libc's idea of the prevailing encoding. I think that
means the patch I committed earlier is still a good idea, but the
comments need a bit of adjustment. Will fix.
regards, tom lane