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

[Ben Discoe]

Andrey,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrey Kiselev
> Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 11:05 PM
> 
> My concern is not only a file names, but the Unicode support 
> for all GDAL/OGR strings.  Personally I would like to see 
> localized field names in OGR and localized metadata in GDAL. 

I can't imagine how other GDAL/OGR would need to do charset manipulation?
As long as the user gives UTF-8 or other 1-byte strings, GDAL/OGR can be
charset agnostic.  It isn't doing any charset handling now for
non-filenames, and it works just fine.  But, we can keep an eye out for
this, should it turn up.

> But the filename issue is a good starting point.
> I think it should be done in the following steps:
> 1. Pick up the Unicode implementation.
> 2. Implement appropriate CPL layer for Unicode strings.
> 3. Convert all related CPL functions to use this new CPL 
> layer.

I am happy to do this work and submit it, i am just waiting to hear from you
(or Frank, or..? Confused by GDAL's new democracy) that i should proceed.

> Note, that filenames often embedded in more complex 
> structures , so we should be sure that all functions, 
> responsible for parsing or serialization, work correct with 
> UTF-8 strings.

Agreed.

-Ben