On Monday, December 6th, 2004 20:52Z John Cowan va escriure: > Doug Ewell scripsit: > >>> Now suppose you have a UNIX filesystem, containing filenames in a >>> legacy encoding (possibly even more than one). If one wants to >>> switch to UTF-8 filenames, what is one supposed to do? Convert all >>> filenames to UTF-8? >> >> Well, yes. Doesn't the file system dictate what encoding it uses for >> file names? How would it interpret file names with "unknown" >> characters from a legacy encoding? How would they be handled in a >> directory search? > > Windows filesystems do know what encoding they use.
Err, not really. MS-DOS *need to know* the encoding to use, a bit like a *nix application that displays filenames need to know the encoding to use the correct set of glyphs (but constrainst are much more heavy.) Also Windows NT Unicode applications know it, because it can't be changed :-). But when it comes to other Windows applications (still the more common) that happen to operate in 'Ansi' mode, they are subject to the hazard of codepage translations. Even if Windows 'knows' the encoding used for the filesystem (as when it uses NTFS or Joliet, or VFAT on NT kernels; in the other cases it does not even know it, much like with *nix kernels), the only usable set is the _intersection_ of the set used to write and the set used to read; that is, usually, it is restricted to US ASCII, very much like the usable set in *nix cases... Antoine
