Perl path directory greek

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

Hello!

I am a sort of newbe in Perl and maybe I am missing something very simple. On a Windows machine (XP) I am trying to access files (txt, hmtl, etc.) stored in folders which contain no english characters (it's greek). The path is not hard coded but is selected through (getSaveFile or getOpenFile).

My path is

C:\Documents and Settings\OT\Desktop\ελληνικά

Let's say I want to save a file in this folder. I have:

sub saving {
my $path = $mw->getSaveFile(-initialfile => 'text',
                            -defaultextension => '.txt');
  open (OUT, ">$path ") or die $!;
     print OUT "Hello World!";
  close OUT;
}
[download]

I get the following error: TK::Error No such a file or directory. I found this node http://perlmonks.com/?node_id=872508 but it isnot helping me very much as it creates a new folder (and saves the file inside it).

The problem is obviously of encoding nature... but what should I do to work with Perl/Windos on a "non english speaking" machine?

Thank you for your help. Otto

Comment on Perl path directory greek Download Code

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Re: Perl path directory greek by zentara (Cardinal) on Nov 20, 2010 at 18:19 UTC
Hi, have you seen opening accented file names? It is a similar problem , concerning code pages? I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh	[reply]
Re: Perl path directory greek by Burak (Chaplain) on Nov 20, 2010 at 22:22 UTC
You need Win32::Unicode::File	[reply]
Re^2: Perl path directory greek by afoken (Chancellor) on Nov 21, 2010 at 00:37 UTC
Looks promising, but the documentation reads more like chinese than english, and the code still has some strange lines (see below). Use with caution. Problems I see from looking at the code of v0.24: In `Win32::Unicode::Console::_ConsoleOut()`, `warn` is called. I think that line should `print STDERR` instead, but I'm not 100% sure. Several functions (`Win32::Unicode::Console::dieW()`, `Win32::Unicode::Console::warnW()`, `Win32::Unicode::Dir::_croakW`, `Win32::Unicode::File::_croakW`, `Win32::Unicode::File::_carpW`) call `Win32::Unicode::Console::_row_warn()` before `warn()`ing or `die()`ing, which calls `Win32::Unicode::Console::_ConsoleOut()` and thus may call `warn()`, causing repeated or additional calls to a `$SIG{__WARN__}` handler. In `Win32::Unicode::Constant`: TRUE and FALSE, oh well. INFINITE is 0xFFFFFFFF? And what magic numbers hide in `sub CONSOLE_OUTPUT_HANDLE() { +{7 => 1, 11 => 1, 15 => 1} }` and `sub CONSOLE_ERROR_HANDLE() { +{11 => 1, 15 => 1} }`? ~~`Win32::Unicode::Error::errorW()` should perhaps call `format_message()`, not `foramt_message()`.~~ Nope, the same typo is in `Error.xs`. `Win32::Unicode::Util::to64int()` hides a `use bigint`, should have gone since 0.23 according to the `Changes` file. Perhaps this was meant to be `require bigint`? `$Win32::Unicode::Process::SHELL` may be initialised to a constant `C:/WINDOWS/system32/cmd.exe`, even if Windows is installed elsewhere (`C:\WinNT` was common for NT 4 and W2K). `Win32::Unicode::Process::_create_process()` does some strange things with quotes and the command shell instead of calling the native `CreateProcessA()`/`CreateProcessW()` functions. Even the author thinks that code might open a security hole. Both `Win32::Unicode::Process::systemW()` and `Win32::Unicode::Process::execW()` wrap this function. Loading `Win32::Unicode::Native` erases the `@ARGV` array and replaces it with postprocessed values returned by `CommandLineToArgvW()`, including some special cases for "-e", "-", and `$0`. I think it may be possible to confuse the code, so that `@ARGV` ends up with too many or too few arguments (UNTESTED). For Perl >= 5.10, the code lacks special processing for "-E". And for binaries loading perl5xx.dll instead of invoking perl.exe, the code may become completely confused (UNTESTED). Also in `Win32::Unicode::Native`: `sub __FILE__ () { $script }` looks very strange. Was that meant to replace `__FILE__` in `main`? `Win32::Unicode::File::open()` does not support layers (à la `open my $f,'<:utf8',$name`). It also does not support pipes (this is documented). `Win32::Unicode::File::filename_normalize()` replaces several characters in filenames with other strange characters (see `%win32_taboo`). Alexander -- Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Perl path directory greek by afoken (Chancellor) on Nov 20, 2010 at 22:47 UTC
For perl, filenames are just byte streams, unless you explicitly configure perl to think differently of filenames. On 32 bit Windows (and I think also on 64 bit Windows), perl (both Strawberry and Activestate) is traditionally compiled as a legacy application calling the old "ANSI" API, not capable of handling Unicode (as far as I know). That's quite unfortunate. Perl can handle Unicode properly since at least 5.8.1, and most 32 Bit Windows variants have a Unicode API (all of those DLL exports ending with a "W"), unlike many other operating systems. (See also Re^7: any use of 'use locale'? (source encoding)). Look what you get back from `getSaveFile()`. Dump the Unicode flag of $path, dump the length (if you get back a byte stream, the length exceeds the number of characters with your directory name), dump the character codes (`ord()`) of each character. Feel free to use some code from UChelp.pm, especially the `dumpstr()` function. Compare that with what you get from a `readdir()` in `C:\Documents and Settings\OT\Desktop`. Try to make some sense from that, try to convert what you get from `getSaveFile()` to what `readdir()` returned. Encode can help you with that. Apart from that, every file on Win32 has two names (unless you change some settings). A "long" name that may contain white space and strange characters, and a "short" name that is restricted to DOS-compatible 8.3 notation and very few characters (a subset of ASCII, I think). Using the "short" name could help you. Also look at the "W" functions of Win32API::File. Alexander -- Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)	[reply] [d/l] [select]