printf field width doesn't support multibyte characters?

Question

I want printf to recognize multi-byte characters when calculating the field width so that columns line up properly... I can\'t find an answer to this problem and was wonderi

Answer 1

This is kind of late, but I just came across this, and thought I would post it for others coming across the same post. A variation to @ninjalj's answer might be to create a function that returns a string of a given length rather than calculate the required format length:

#!/bin/bash
function sized_string
{
        STR=$1; WIDTH=$2
        local BYTEWIDTH=$( echo -n "$STR" | wc -c )
        local CHARWIDTH=$( echo -n "$STR" | wc -m )
        FMT_WIDTH=$(( $WIDTH + $BYTEWIDTH - $CHARWIDTH ))
        printf "%*s" $FMT_WIDTH $STR
}
printf "[%s]\n" "$(sized_string "abc" 20)"
printf "[%s]\n" "$(sized_string "ab•cd" 20)"

which outputs:

[                 abc]
[               ab•cd]