Fri Jun  3 12:20:17 IDT 2005

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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

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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.