[Haskell-cafe] Unicoded filenames

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Here is what happens when a language provides only narrow-char API for
filenames:

-------------------- Start of forwarded message --------------------
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:18:00 +0100
From: Peter Jolly <peter at jollys.org>
To: mattias.waldau at abc.se
CC: caml-list <caml-list at inria.fr>
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] How do I create files with UTF-8 file names?

Mattias Waldau wrote:
> I have a filename as an UTF-8 encoded string. I need to be able to 
> handle strange chars like accents, Asian chars etc.
> 
> Is there any way to create a file with that name? I only need it on Win32.

Windows uses UTF-16 for filenames, but provides a non-Unicode interface 
for legacy applications; the standard open() function that OCaml's 
open_out wraps appears to use the legacy interface.  The precise 
codepage this uses is system-dependent, and AFAIK there's no way for a 
program to determine what it is without calling out to the Win32 API, 
but you can be pretty sure it won't be UTF-8.

In other words, there is no reliable way to use a filename containing 
non-ASCII characters with OCaml's standard library.

> Or should I solve this problem by talking directly to the Win32-api?

This is probably the best solution.  A combination of CreateFileW() and 
MultiByteToWideChar() should do what you want.

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-------------------- End of forwarded message --------------------

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak at knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/