Wow. That would suck, IMHO. Talk about a complicated mess of an over-designed system.

Simply supporting Unicode strings as file names/paths is what should be done and is what was done in Win32. Perl doesn't support strings in multiple encodings (they are either Unicode in UTF-8 or aren't, when they are instead composed of 8-bit characters). Similarly, Win32 strings are either Unicode in UTF-16 (or so) or aren't, when they are composed of 8-bit characters. Win32 at least makes clear what the "aren't" case means; it means the string is in the encoding of the process's current locality (not in some encoding based on what part of the file system it is referring to, which would be an unholy mess).

The support for Win32 would be fairly simple, instead of always converting to 8-bit character strings before calling a Windows *A() function (which then converts them to UTF-16), we should always convert to UTF-16 strings before calling a Windows *W() function.

If Unix support for Unicode filenames is going a route similar to what you outlined, then I won't hold my breath for that being stable and don't think Perl should try to implement support for it, because I predict that route would be doomed to be abandoned anyway.

- tye        

In reply to Re^6: Writing UTF8 Filename (Win32) by tye
in thread Writing UTF8 Filename by amiribarksdale

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