Hello, I am trying to understand the phase of translation where the option in gcc -finput-charset comes in effect as given here: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Preprocessor-Options.html#Preprocessor-Options > -finput-charset=charset > Set the input character set, used for translation from the character set of > the input file to the source character set used by GCC. If the locale does > not specify, or GCC cannot get this information from the locale, the > default is UTF-8. This can be overridden by either the locale or this > command-line option. Currently the command-line option takes precedence if > there’s a conflict. charset can be any encoding supported by the system’s > iconv library routine. > For phases of translation, I looked at this article at https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/translation_phases In Phase 1, it mentions: The individual bytes of the source code file are mapped (in > implementation-defined manner) to the characters of the basic source > character set. In particular, OS-dependent end-of-line indicators are > replaced by newline characters. > Then in Phase 5, it says that -finput-charset comes in effect. Note: the conversion performed at this stage can be controlled by command > line options in some implementations: gcc and clang use -finput-charset > to specify the encoding of the source character set ... > To my understanding, in Phase 1, when compiler translates the source file to basic source character set, the encoding specified by -finput-charset should be already in effect. E.g., the encoding by default is UTF-8 on GCC, then the source file is read using UTF-8. Why do they say that in Phase 5 that -finput-charset can be used to specify the encoding at that stage? Since the characters were already read in Phase 1 from source using UTF-8. Are they correct in this regard?
