[Bug 1803327] Re: iconv no longer transforms UTF8 to CP1252 as it used to under Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

[Bernard Moreton]

Yes, I've done dumps to od -xc, and I agree - iconv is behaving
correctly.

Under Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, passing multibyte characters from a database into RTF, then on into LibreOffice caused the unknown character symbol (�) in LibreOffice.  
Using "unix2dos < in.txt | iconv -f UTF-8 -t CP1252 > out.txt" fixed that, then - seemingly by getting pure latin-1 into the RTF file, as the RTF spec. requires.

Now, under Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it appears to cause the problem  If I use
this this transform, I get the unknown character symbol in the LO
document, and if I leave it out, and put multibyte characters into the
RTF, LibreOffice shows them correctly.

So other things have changed, as well as ICONV, and I see other recent
references to multibyte characters in RTF.  And in any case, it's not
really desirable to have non-ASCII latin-1 characters in a UTF8
environment.

Thnk you for your care.  Please close this bug report.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1803327

Title:
  iconv no longer transforms UTF8 to CP1252 as it used to under Ubuntu
  16.04 LTS.

Status in glibc package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Under Ubuntu 16.04 LTS I used code in the form
     unix2dos < in.txt | iconv -f UTF-8 -t CP1252 > out.txt
  (as in "man unix2dos", then and also still now under 18.04 LTS)
  to transform UTF8 database extract into an RTF file, for onward processing.
  This now fails.

  inconv now gives output as follows:

  echo abc àêü | iconv -f utf-8 -t cp1252
  abc ���

  echo abc àêü | iconv -f utf-8 -t cp1252//translit
  abc ���

  echo abc àêü | iconv -f utf-8 -t latin1//translit
  abc ���

  But inconv WILL transform UTF8 to basic ASCII, if called with TRANLIT:

  echo abc àêü | iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii
  abc iconv: illegal input sequence at position 4

  echo abc àêü | iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//translit
  abc aeu

  This is better than not working at all, but the transform to CP1252 used to change accented UTF8 characters to single-byte accented characters 
  This is the appropriate behaviour, and should be restored..

  
  (FWIW, recode now cannot transform to CP1252 either ...)

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
  Package: libc-bin 2.27-3ubuntu1
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-38.41-generic 4.15.18
  Uname: Linux 4.15.0-38-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.4
  Architecture: amd64
  CurrentDesktop: X-Cinnamon
  Date: Wed Nov 14 10:53:57 2018
  Dependencies:
   gcc-8-base 8.2.0-1ubuntu2~18.04
   libc6 2.27-3ubuntu1
   libgcc1 1:8.2.0-1ubuntu2~18.04
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-03-09 (614 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160420.1)
  SourcePackage: glibc
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
  modified.conffile..etc.ld.so.conf:
   include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf
   
   /lib /lib/esql  /usr/local/lib
  mtime.conffile..etc.ld.so.conf: 2017-03-21T19:11:53.466413

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