Brian Kernighan Updates Awk to Add Unicode Support

Brian Kernighan, co-creator of Awk (and the K in the name of the tool), has quietly submitted code for adding Unicode support to the scripting language, reports Kevin Purdy.

Awk is “a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix’s pipeline features and interoperability between systems,” Purdy explains.

Kernighan, who is now 80 years old, recently spoke about the language and its uses in an interview with Computerphile, noting that “it’s always been an embarrassment that Awk only worked with ASCII, or maybe 8-bit inputs, but it doesn’t really handle Unicode at all.”

Read more at Ars Technica.