[tz] [PROPOSED 2/2] Prefer “°” to “degrees” when quoting source saying former

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Tue Jan 24 23:08:33 UTC 2023


On 1/24/23 00:52, Martin Burnicki wrote:
> I don't think that using the degree symbol instead of something like 
> [deg] or [degree] in source code (message texts or comments) is a good 
> idea because the degree symbol is part of the extended character set 
> which depends on code page currently selected by the user, and thus may 
> be displayed correctly, or not.

As mentioned in NEWS, TZDB commentary has been using been using some 
UTF-8 encoded characters since release 2018d. The set of characters used 
has included ‘°’ (U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN).

This doesn’t seem to have been much of a problem, as widespread support 
for UTF-8 has largely obsoleted problems with 8-bit encodings that rely 
on extended character sets and code pages. See, for example, 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popularity_of_text_encodings>.

The recent patch catches a couple of instances of ‘°’ that I missed back 
in 2018.


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