http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=1226103

IB2017 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Monks

As always in my relationship to Perl and Windows, I am having problems with non Latin characters in file names/directories. In this case I am selecting an Excel file in Tk with getOpenFile. This seems to work fine, as the script demonstrate. On my machine (Windows 10, locale German), I can open Excel files with file names and in directories with non Latin characters (Chinese and so on). The selected path is shown correctly in my Tk app. However, I can not parse it as it fails with Tk::Error: Can't call method "read" on an undefined value at C:/Perl/site/lib/Spreadsheet/ParseXLSX.pm line 79. which means something is wrong with the path. As you can see, I try to use also Win32::LongPath: in some case it gives back a long path which is then fine for Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX, in others it gives back the original, which Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX can not open. Note that the script has to run on any desktop machine having all different locale settings.

use strict; use warnings; use Tk; use Win32::LongPath; use Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX; my $mw = Tk::MainWindow->new(); my $path; my $button = $mw->Button( -text => "Select a file", -command => \&show_file_dialog, )->pack(-side => 'left',); my $label = $mw->Label( -text => 'No file yet', )->pack(-side => 'left',); $mw->MainLoop(); sub show_file_dialog { my @ext = ( ["Excel", ['xlsx']], ["All files", ['*']], ); $path = $mw->getOpenFile( -filetypes => \@ext, ); #use shortpath my $ShortPath = shortpathL ($path); #print path read and path converted with short path inside Tk $label->configure(-text => "$path - $ShortPath"); print "try to open file with shortpathL path\n"; my $parser = Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX->new(); my $workbook = $parser->parse($ShortPath); print "try to open file with original path\n"; my $parser = Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX->new(); my $workbook = $parser->parse($path); }

What can I do to achieve my goal given that shortpathL returns only sometimes a nice path? (for example it dowsn't seem to work if the file is on a removable device, or in some positions on the hard drive, etc.). Win32::Unicode is not an option as it is not maintained and compilation fails on any modern Perl. Thank you for your suggestions.