Re: sed error message reports byte position instead of char position when program contains UTF-8

> Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> wrote:

> "Byte" is the only viable alternative, but that leaves the burden of
> counting bytes on the user.

If you use a very long sed script, this can be a problem. 
I happen to write sed scripts that are more than 1000 characters long.
My last one is currently 1762 characters long and still growing.
That's why I wrote a little bash function which would show me 
the n'th character. but this gave wrong positions on scripts with
UTF-8 chars. 

The work-around is to change LC_CTYPE to C around the string 
processing part in my bash function, but, I believe that since sed 
supports multibytes characters, the error message should count 
characters and not bytes. btw : the error message states that the 
position is "char" and not "byte" : 

sed: -e expression #1, char 12: unknown option to `s'