in reply to Problems Opening file with Perl where path has UTF8

Dang. I need to add CreateFileW() to Win32API::File... ): I thought I had but it was Win32API::Registry that included the *W hooks...

Update: Short of that, I think you are stuck with only 8-bit characters when using open. So your options are likely:

  1. Switch to a locale where the file name only requires 8-bit characters
  2. Use the "short name" to open the file (at least I think that will work around this problem
  3. Rename the file (or, under NTFS, provide a hard link to the file using a name w/o problematic characters)

It is too bad that Win32.pm includes GetShortPathName() [which is GetShortPathNameA()] but not GetShortPathNameW().

Update: Yep, I checked the latest Perl source code and open under Win32 hasn't been made smart enough to handle UTF-8 strings.

ikegami mentioned (in the CB) using Win32::API to get access to CreateFileW(), which you could combine with Win32API::File's OsFHandleOpen() to get a Perl file handle to use.

- tye        

  • Comment on Re: Problems Opening file with Perl where path has UTF8 (sorry)

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Re^2: Problems Opening file with Perl where path has UTF8 (d'oh!)
by tye (Sage) on Nov 23, 2006 at 03:20 UTC

    Um, actually, Win32API::File does have CreateFileW(), just not mentioned in the documentation. 

    my $wPath= pack "S*",
    unpack( "C*", "C:/server/htdocs/DEVELOPMENT/testing/" ),
    19968, 26869, 39640, 26641,
    unpack( "C*", "/test/test.ssi" ),
    0;
my $hFile= CreateFileW(
    $wPath,
    GENERIC_READ()|GENERIC_WRITE(),
    FILE_SHARE_READ()|FILE_SHARE_WRITE(), [],
    OPEN_EXISTING(), 0, [] )
    or  die "Can't open: $^E\n";
OsFHandleOpen( *DATFILE, $hFile, "rw" )
    or  die "Can't create Perl handle: $!\n";
my $strHeaderLine = <DATFILE>;
print $strHeaderLine;
close DATFILE;

    [download]

    Note, this code is untested because I composed it under Linux.

    Update: I need to update createFile() to detect UTF-8 path names and do all this for you...

    - tye        

[reply]
[d/l]

      Update: The striken text is only true for the system call CreateFileW, but not for Win32API::File's verion of CreateFileW.

      CreateFileW returns INVALID_FILE_HANDLE (-1) on error, not false. 

      use constant INVALID_FILE_HANDLE => -1;

my $hFile= CreateFileW(
    $wPath,
    GENERIC_READ()|GENERIC_WRITE(),
    FILE_SHARE_READ()|FILE_SHARE_WRITE(), [],
    OPEN_EXISTING(), 0, [] );

INVALID_FILE_HANDLE != $hFile
    or  die "Can't open: $^E\n";

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        Did you try this? Because the XS code and the documentation for Win32API::File's CreateFile() shows that a false value is returned on error.

        - tye        

[reply]
Re^2: Problems Opening file with Perl where path has UTF8 (sorry)
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 23, 2006 at 18:51 UTC
    What about FindFirstFileW() (also not in Win32API::File) unfortunately, for opening directories in UTF-8? In perl's win32/win32.c - win32_open has deprecated USING_WIDE(), so there's no real option at this point. :( I'd really like to see File::Find work on Win32 with UTF-8 filenames & dirs. Thanks
[reply]

      FindFirstFileA() isn't even in Win32API::File. Unfortunately, the complex structs used makes it less trivial to add; but I'll look into that. But that wouldn't help File::Find much. Better would be to fix readdir (and thus glob, I'd hope) on Win32 to use FindFirstFileW() and return UTF-8 file names only if the found files have names with non-8-bit characters in them (or perhaps non-7-bit characters), or perhaps do things backward compatably based on something in %ENV (well, I prefer using %ENV over some obscure internal Perl variable because I find such preferences easier to deploy).

      - tye        

[reply]
        Yeah, readdir() needs work too.

        Anything that would help - I'm completely unable to read UTF-8 files on Windows right now.

        Thanks

[reply]

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