Re: [PATCH] Use FIX_UTF8_MAC to enable conversion from UTF8-MAC to UTF8

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 22, 2008, 11:57 UTC
Message-ID: <20080122115741.GI14871@dpotapov.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0801212025050.2957@woody.linux-foundation.org>

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 08:59:56PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> Anyway, even if you do that, our "reencode_string()" is really *so* 
> expensive that you really don't want to do it on a filename by filename 
> basis. It literally does a malloc() for each allocation. It might well be 
> worth it to find something that is more utf-8-specific (and I could well 
> imagine that Mac OS X comes with some UTF libraries, if only because we 
> cannot possibly be the only people with this issue).

Yes, starting with Mac OS X 10.2 there are functions for that. http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1235.html

Anyway, even if iconv is to be used, I believe it should be possible to avoid malloc here (I usually allocate 256 on stack and use malloc()/free() only when I need more than that which in practice never happens!). It is also avoidable to call iconv_open/iconv_close for each name by putting the allocated descriptor for character set conversion into a static variable. Thus leaving iconv() alone, which should not be big overhead provided that it is done only for non-ASCII names.

Dmitry