in reply to Re: how to unicode filenames?
in thread how to unicode filenames?

I'll certainly give it a try... if it performs well, I'd prefer it over my hack-around of calling 'find' (as perl doesn't have a problem with the filenames if they come in on STDIN)...

do I want to 'decode' utf8? the utf8 page mentions something about using Encode -- basically I don't need it to be decoded as much as to just be "relabeled" in place as already being "UTF-8-ified"...

Thanks again! (which I could give more than one positive vote to people who are really helpful -- considering the vast difference when compared to those who are just contrarian)...

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Re^3: how to unicode filenames?
by zentara (Cardinal) on Jun 28, 2012 at 08:42 UTC
    Hi, I would like to share my Unicode battles with you, since we both are fighting the same battle it seems. After a few unicode related posts, yours being one of them, I decided to try and make a little utility I wrote, named vgrep, unicode aware. It was quite a hit or miss transformation. See Gtk2 Visual Grep

    I has to add the -CS perlrun switch, use the unicode::all module, and even after all that, I still needed to use $Encode::decode() in many places to get the desired output.

    Even though my linux filesystem locale is en_US.UTF-8 in my .bashrc, I still needed to run input strings and filenames thru decode. I'm using Perl 5.14.1.

    It works, but it definitely seems to my sensibilities that it should be simpler. I guess the problem comes from having many files and filenames comng in thru the net, and left over from previous Latin-1 linux installations, which are not UTF-8.

    The general rule I seem to be seeing is "treat all input as binary" then decode. My vgrep program still emits some errors when searching thru pdf files, which are detected as being -t text, but contain binary images; and I don't understand why File::Find dosn't automatically see unicode filenames, without having to decode $File::Find::name.


    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
    Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

      File::Find does not automatically "see" (or return) unicode filenames, because for Perl there is no way to know that what the file system APIs return is UTF-8-encoded text. If you are certain that this is always the case, I guess you can wrap your own decode() wrapper around it, but I see it breaking for many situations where different filesystems with different filename encodings come together.

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      A quick suggestion: You have -CS, but for a 'find', you might want to evaluate if -CSA would be a better choice for such a program.