Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] builtin/repo: fix table alignment for UTF-8 characters

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2025, 16:49 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqjyzrfdgj.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <0eee1597-3e83-4a47-90a5-60942da01673@gmail.com>

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

> How does it ensure proper column alignment for non-utf8 encodings? I
> don't see how it is possible to calculate the display width without
> knowing the encoding.

Correct. But for Git, pretty much the ship has sailed, I am afraid. All tools that rely on utf8_strwidth() are "broken" in that way if you feed latin-1 or ISO/IEC 2022, and that includes "diff --stat" with pathnames in non-UTF8 encodings (I do not remember if we fully fixed the codepath for UTF-8---it used to be broken even for UTF-8).

> Using strbuf_utf8_align ends up being quite verbose. An alternative
> would be to keep using printf() but calculate the padding ourselves as
> shown below.

I think that has been the preferred way to do this, utf8_strwidth() to measure and decide how wide each column can be, then for each row, we measure and make printf() fit, or truncate when the column we decide to allocate cannot accomodate the data on a particular row that is overly long.

Thanks.