Re: gdb support for wide char

[Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com>]

>>>>> "Yifan" == Yifan Wang <heavenstar@gmail.com> writes:

Yifan> in gdb, i usually use "p" or "x /s" to print strings in my
Yifan> program.  But the problem is, when i write some program for
Yifan> non-english user, i usually use utf-8 or utf-16 strings. gdb
Yifan> can not print those string properly.  so i want to write a
Yifan> patch to gdb so that gdb can support printing utf strings.

Yifan> I am not familar with the gdb source files, can someone give
Yifan> some ideas about where i should start and which part of the
Yifan> source files cover the topic?  Any hints or ideas are great

gdb has an idea about the host and target charsets.  Unfortunately it
does not understand very many encodings.

You could start by looking at charset.c.  I think it needs an API
overhaul to work with "more complicated" character set encodings,
though offhand I don't recall whether UTF-8 fits into that category.

If you are on a system with a nice iconv (anything using glibc at
least), you could make charset.c handle just about anything.  This
would let you do:

    set target-charset UTF-8
    print str

If your host isn't using glibc, I would suggest investigating the use
of libiconv, rather than continuing down the current path of
charset.c.

There are actually a few other missing features in this area.  I think
gdb should probably also have a "wide target charset", for programs
using wchar_t.  And, with the new UTF strings stuff in GCC, perhaps a
"/u" format to "p" would be appropriate.

Tom