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

[Frank Warmerdam]

Ben Discoe wrote:
> 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.

Ben / Andrey,

Perhaps we should look at doing a first pass implementation only for
filenames, and then look at other strings (metadata, descriptions,
OGR field values and field names) as a second pass if filenames
are where most of the benefit is.

>> 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.

GDAL's new democracy is covered in:

   http://www.gdal.org/rfc1_pmc.html

Briefly, a disruptive change such as the UTF-8 upgrade needs to be
written up as a formal proposal to the PSC, and voted on after discussion.

I think I would like to see a 1.3.3 release before we start incorporating
UTF-8 support, and at that point we would likely consider the UTF-8 work
to be towards GDAL 1.4.0.

>> 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.

Good point.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org