Re: Any portable way get a filename in UTF-8 or to get the FS encoding ?

On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:22:12 +0300, Timothy Madden wrote:

I have seen _wreaddir function in some implementations, but is there a
portable way to get a file's name in UTF-8 or to get a file name in the
underlaying encoding of its file system and to get the encoding ?

Are POSIX implementations required to convert the file name return by
readdir to the application's execution character set ?

The encoding used for file names on any given file system is never
specified in a POSIX system, and a user is free to create file names
using several different encodings even on the same file system. (I
actually have such a file system myself, where most file names are
encoded in UTF-8 but the file names in one directory are encoded in
ISO-8859-1.)

A process that wants to interpret the bytes that makes up a file name
must look at its environment for hints about which encoding the user
wants those file names to be interpreted as (eg. the LC_* environment
variables). You can use the mbstowcs() library function to automatically
convert a string into a wide character string according to the encoding
specified by the current environment.

Cheers // Fredrik Roubert

--
Dyre Halses gate 10 | +47 73568556 / +47 41266295
NO-7042 Trondheim | http://www.df.lth.se/~roubert/
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