Re: Using .XCompose
On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 02:51:33PM +0000, Ajith R wrote:
> 5) execute grep $'\x00A0' .XCompose. All lines from the .XCompose file were listed.
Bash's $'...' quoting allows several different forms, and you've used
the wrong one. The \x is followed by *two* hex digits, to give a single
byte. You've got $'\x00' which is a NUL byte. Passing a NUL byte as
an argument to a command is equivalent to passing the empty string.
So, basically you have run
grep '' .XCompose
which, as you observed, gives you every line of the file.
I would imagine you were trying to pass a Unicode character. If that's
the case, you need the \u or \U form instead.
grep $'\u00A0' .XCompose
Unicode character 00A0 is a non-breaking space. It's not clear whether
that was your intention or not.
> I noticed that there is $ sign before the search string, which I couldn't understand. I removed it and re-executed the new grep command grep '\x00A0' .XCompose. Now it doesn't return the line
Uh... you mean you *weren't* trying to grep for non-breaking spaces
in your file using bash's $'...' quoting syntax? You're just typing
something you found at random on the Internet without understanding
it? That's pretty dangerous.
<https://mywiki.wooledge.org/Quotes> might be good reading for you at
this point.
> 6) The command grep "W" .XCompose | tr $'\xc2\xa0' \! returns
> grep "W" .XCompose | tr $'\xc2\xa0' \!
The two hex bytes c2 a0 are the UTF-8 encoding of a non-breaking space,
so it *does* seem like you're chasing after non-breaking spaces for
some reason....
If that's truly your goal, you might also want to pursue configuring
your text editor to show them to you. There are various ways to do
that, depending on which text editor you use.
(I don't even know whether you're in a UTF-8 encoding, though, so
who knows whether those are even the correct bytes for an NBSP in
your locale. You're better off using \u00A0 instead.)
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