in reply to Re^2: Printing the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (U05D0) kills script?
in thread Printing the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (U05D0) kills script?

I'm on completely unknown (to me) ground here now, but do xterm's retain the old-fashioned serial port configuration parameters?

What I'm getting at is that it used to be possible to configure terminals for 7-bit or 8-bit; odd/even/no parity etc.

If you sent unicode to a terminal that was configured to expect 7-bit input, it might strip the 8th bit. And byte value \220 (decimal 144) suddenly becomes ascii 16 which is right in amongst the device control characters often used for X-on/X-off and similar. (It's not one of those two, but who knows what others there were back in the day?)

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