Re: Directory operations and Unicode

The problem is that Win32 seems to be the only platform that offers an Unicode-aware file system API.

On Linux, file names are zero-byte terminated binary strings, the interpretation is left to the userland. One can guess based on the locale, or just assume something globally, but neither approach is robust.

So perl continues to offer an experience that is equally bad on Unix and Win32. I'm not aware of any changes to this (planned or released), but them I'n not up to date with p5p either.

Perl 6 - second systems done right

Comment on Re: Directory operations and Unicode

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Re^2: Directory operations and Unicode by afoken (Chancellor) on Nov 02, 2011 at 11:13 UTC
The problem is that Win32 seems to be the only platform that offers an Unicode-aware file system API. And as far as I know, all perls compiled for Windows still use the "ANSI" API to access the file system (i.e. CreateFileA instead of CreateFileW). Completely switching Perl to use the "wide" API may have "interesting" side effects. A very obvious one would be `readdir` returning Unicode strings instead of byte strings. Will existing code be able to handle that? Alexander -- Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Directory operations and Unicode by moritz (Cardinal) on Nov 02, 2011 at 11:16 UTC
And even if you make the wide character API only available with a pragma, you still need separate calling code for Windows and Unix, which was mostly my point. Perl 6 - second systems done right	[reply]