On 30/03/2024 23:38, Bruno Haible wrote:
Hi Pádraig,

As a matter of interest, where did you get the figure that
94% of users have a $TERM set to xterm.* ?

Personal guesses / estimations :-D.

+def get_terminfo_string(capability: str) -> str:
+    '''Returns the value of a string-type terminfo capability for the current 
value of $TERM.
+    Returns the empty string if not defined.'''
+    value = ''
+    try:
+        value = sp.run(['tput', capability], stdout=sp.PIPE, 
stderr=sp.DEVNULL).stdout.decode('utf-8')
+    except Exception:
+        pass
+    return value

Might latin-1 be more appropriate here, to accept all byte sequences?

But it would be output in UTF-8 later, during print(...). therefore
converting to a string here is inappropriate.

I tried to return a byte array here instead of a string, but this led to
ugly code elsewhere.

I used the following for example to see that xterm-8bit outputs an invalid 
utf-8 sequence:

    find /usr/share/terminfo -type f -printf '%f\n' | while read t; do
      echo -n $t; TERM=$t tput bold | od -An -tx1
    done | grep -v 1b

I know the code path isn't used for xterm.* and I don't want to cause any more 
complexity,
but was wondering all the same.

If such a TERM value is used, the decode('utf-8') step will fail, thus the
value returned from get_terminfo_string will be empty, and bold-face won't
work.

This is not perfect, but it is good enough. Often, it's necessary to say
"it's good enough" because otherwise I spend more and more time on a tiny
feature. I have verified that it works with all TERM values of all OSes
for which I have virtual machines (except for Solaris 11.4, as mentioned);
I'm not inclined in spending more time on it.

Oh right I missed the exception handling :)
Absolutely agreed on all points.

Thanks for the clarification,
Pádraig.


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