[Gdal-dev] Wide-character filenames with GDAL file IO?

[Andrey Kiselev]

On Sat, Sep 09, 2006 at 02:31:48PM -1000, Ben Discoe wrote:
> > I have tried opening a variety of unusual filenames in different
> > character sets, including double byte names, on windows successfully
> > (I think). I believe I just passed whatever got passed in as a
> > filename after using shell completion.
> 
> What shell are you using?   I tried with cygwin, and this is what i
> get.

Ben,

AFAIK Cygwin does not support locale, so any locale-related tests are
not clean under Cygwin.

I think the simplest way to add multibyte support to GDAL is using UTF-8
as an internal character set. All strings and filenames should be passed
in UTF-8 encoding and properly converted to UCS-16 when needed (_wopen
on Windows). The major drawback of this change is additional
requirement: we will need an Unicode library to replace all string
handling functions from the C lib with the Unicode aware ones.

This problem was raised one time in the past, probably this is a time
when we should prepare RFC for GDAL localization. This is a major
change, this change can broke functionality, so it is painful, but
inevitable.

Best regards,
Andrey

-- 
Andrey V. Kiselev
ICQ# 26871517