I have a 10K LOC open source application suite which uses Tk and builds to self-contained "compiled" applications on Windows*, Linux, and OSX using ActiveState Perl Dev Kit 1.9 and ActivePerl 5.8.1 (this cannot be changed as later AS Perl releases have no Tk). My users generally don't know Perl from a hole in the road, so this compile step is rather mandatory

It runs fine for English speaking countries, but is now starting to be used in France and Germany where extended char set chars in the file paths are causing difficulty (of the file not found variety, even though the file was selected from a file browser). It does not just use simple "open" statements; there are a lot of -f, -d etc, plus XML::Simple and other API's which take a filename as an argument (would love to use XML::LibXML instead, but AS 5.8 defeats me again because there is no distro available for OSX i386 and PPC).

For example, a path like "nfo_test/Un monde à nous (2007)" causes a -d to say it does not exist. Converting the name to a single byte string, works for -d, but not for -f (go figure). I'd like to internationalize the app to at least handle 'decorations' in French, German, and other Romance language countries (let's forget Chinese/Japanese, etc), though reading leads me to suspect this may not be possible. It already handles utf8 chars in text strings correctly. It's just file paths causing trouble. Suggestions most welcome. Just in case, the source is at http://itee.uq.edu.au/~chernich/tagsuite.html

In reply to File path internationalization by ron7

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