Re: Gibberish file names on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:53:23 +0100
> 
> Chinese file names are displayed as gibberish for example:
> 
> 7cde~1
> b8ce~1
> d3cb~1
> f091~1
> bdea~1

Say thanks that they are displayed at all ;-)  In Emacs 22.1 and
before, you simply cannot see such files.

The Windows port of Emacs does not yet use the Unicode versions of the
filesystem APIs, it uses the so-called ``ANSI'' versions.  ANSI
versions support only non-ASCII characters native to the current
system locale.  So in any locale but the Chinese one, Emacs cannot see
files with Chinese characters, because the system call that lists
files in a directory simply returns any such characters as `?', which
is an invalid file-name character on Windows.

To avoid such a total lossage in these cases, Emacs 22.2 and later
uses the short 8+3 file name instead, which is what you see above.

Some day Emacs will begin using the Unicode APIs, at which point you
will see all the characters in any locale.  But converting Emacs to
the Unicode APIs is a formidable job, so even Emacs 23.1 will probably
not be released with it.

> They are shown correctly under w32 explorer.

The Windows Explorer on Windows XP does support the full Unicode
APIs.  But many other programs that come with Windows don't.