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Re: [RFC PATCH] Windows: Assume all file names to be UTF-8 encoded.

From
Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se>
Date
Mar 2, 2009, 13:57 UTC
Message-ID
<alpine.DEB.2.00.0903021452010.17877@perkele.intern.softwolves.pp.se>
In-Reply-To
<a2633edd0903020512u5682e9am203f0faccd0acf6a@mail.gmail.com>
Hi!
> Makes sense too. I think the whole API would have to be changed to use 
> TCHAR*.

I'd rather just say wchar_t explicitely. I'm not particularly fond of macros that change under your feet just because you fail to define a symbol somewhere...

> Then you need to do the right conversion at the right places, this will be 
> quite tricky, painful work, but there is probably no way around that.

In the other project I worked on we ended up wrapping all file-related calls in our own porting interface, and then let each platform we compiled for implement their own methods for handling Unicode paths. For Windows it's trivial since all APIs are Unicode. For Unix-like OSes it's tricky as you have to take the locale settings into account, but fortunately the world is slowly moving towards UTF-8 locales, which eases the pain a bit.

> Note that not only conversions will be needed but you'll also need to 
> adjust all routines handling filenames to use the proper Unicode version. 
> (strchr -> _tstrchr, open -> _topen, strcpy -> _tstrcpy, strlen -> 
> _tcslen, ...).

Not necessarily. If the code can be set up to use UTF-8 char* internally, not everything needs to be rewritten (I've done that too, only took a couple of years to move the codebase over to all-Unicode).

-- 
\\// Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/
Previous: Robin RosenbergNext: Thomas Rast
Message 15 of 26 in “Windows: Assume all file names to be UTF-8 encoded.”
  1. Windows: Assume all file names to be UTF-8 encoded.Peter Krefting, Mar 2, 2009
  2. Johannes SixtMar 2, 2009
  3. Peter KreftingMar 2, 2009
  4. Johannes SchindelinMar 2, 2009
  5. Peter KreftingMar 2, 2009
  6. Johannes SixtMar 2, 2009
  7. Peter KreftingMar 2, 2009
  8. Robin RosenbergMar 2, 2009
  9. Peter KreftingMar 2, 2009
  10. Robin RosenbergMar 2, 2009
  11. Peter KreftingMar 3, 2009
  12. Dmitry PotapovMar 3, 2009
  13. Peter KreftingMar 3, 2009
  14. Robin RosenbergMar 7, 2009
  15. Peter KreftingMar 2, 2009
  16. Thomas RastMar 2, 2009
  17. Peter KreftingMar 2, 2009
  18. Lars NoschinskiMar 3, 2009
  19. Peter KreftingMar 3, 2009
  20. Lars NoschinskiMar 3, 2009
  21. Robin RosenbergMar 3, 2009
  22. Dmitry PotapovMar 3, 2009
  23. Peter KreftingMar 3, 2009
  24. Dmitry PotapovMar 3, 2009
  25. Peter KreftingMar 4, 2009
  26. Dmitry PotapovMar 4, 2009

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