On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Gisle Vanem wrote:

> I sympathise with the OP. Printing binary data to stdout can cause havoc to
> any terminal settings. (I did that on Linux which caused the display fonts
> to change!?). Especially Win-9x/ME is bad at handling this; partly due to
> the large 4K console buffer.

I recognize that binary output sent to the terminal can cause havoc on any
platform, that is not limited to any particular one.

> curl could perhaps test the percentage of 8-bit chars and their parity and
> abort if the stream is binary (and stdout isn't redirected). Ref. how pppd
> detects if the serial-line is not 8-bit clean (routine ppp_clean_check).

That would make a few assumptions I'm not sure we can or want to do.

How do we detect that the output just isn't an exotic charset we're not that
familiar with? I bet the asian unicode charsets use a reasonably high rate of
8bit letters, not to mention the ISO8859-X family.

Does isatty() work on Windows?

I think I'm nore in favour of declaring that curl is a power tool, and when
using power tools there are ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

-- 
 Daniel Stenberg -- curl: been grokking URLs since 1998
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