Alex, Thank you for your detailed reply. Much appreciated :-) I will code the components as you suggested, use the UTF-8 as the default encoding and let the users choose alternate encodings if they wish so.
I had another idea how to get the encoding the server is using, dunno if it's good enough :-) The idea was to open the ssh channel and read the LANG/LC_ALL env variables if they exist, parse them and set the encoding; if they don’t exist revert to default. This will have to wait, cause I'm on vacation right now, and before that I need to port the port forwarding part completely :-) Best regards, Zeljko -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alexander Lamaison Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 12:21 AM To: libssh2 development Subject: Re: SFTP character encoding and problem with agent auth On 11 August 2010 23:15, Alexander Lamaison <[email protected]> wrote: > 2010/8/11 Željko Marjanović <[email protected]>: >> Is it possible to determine the character encoding the SSH/SFTP >> server is using? I have read the protocol specs for SFTP v3 and there >> is no mention of it, but in v4 default encoding is UTF-8. Is it safe >> to assume and use UTF-8 for default encoding? > > I have no idea how SFTP v4 expects servers to guarantee they supply > UTF-8 when the server doesn't even know the encoding of its own > filenames! Lo and behold, this is what the SFTP v6 spec says [1]: The preferred encoding for filenames is UTF-8. This is consistent with IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages [RFC2277] and it is further supposed that the server is more likely to support any local character set and be able to convert it to UTF-8. However, because the server does not always know the encoding of filenames, it is not always possible for the server to preform a valid translation to UTF-8. When an invalid translation to UTF-8 is preformed, it becomes impossible to manipulate the file, because the translation is not reversible. ... [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-13#page-15 Alex -- Swish - Easy SFTP for Windows Explorer (http://www.swish-sftp.org) _______________________________________________ libssh2-devel http://cool.haxx.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libssh2-devel _______________________________________________ libssh2-devel http://cool.haxx.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libssh2-devel
