Kenichi Handa wrote:

>In article <c99f54dd040810043627699b54@mail.gmail.com>, Mattis <brakjoller@gmail.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>> Are they real question marks?  Have you checked them with
>>> "C-x ="?
>>>      
>>>
>>Yes, they are real question marks.
>>    
>>
> 
>Hmmm, then something is different in Windows port.
>  
>
>>I do not know how to proceed. It definitely seems like the low level
>>emacs functions do not support all characters under Windows. Is this
>>considered a bug or a non-feature?
>>    
>>
>
>I have no idea because I have almost no knowledge about
>Windows.  Jason, do you know why
>
>  
>
The functions that deal with file names in the C library on Windows 
return ? for characters that are not supported by the system locale, 
even though NTFS supports Unicode file names. The answer would be to use 
Unicode-aware Win32 API functions instead of the standard C library, but 
such functions are only supported on some versions of Windows, so 
determining when to use them and when not to is a problem.

It is quite unusual for users to enter filenames in languages other than 
their own, and Emacs is certainly not the only application that has this 
problem (try "dir" in the windows command prompt for example), so this 
has not been high priority. It is probably appropriate to look at this 
in the next version of Emacs that uses Unicode internally. To do so now 
is too big a change for feature-freeze, I think and we already have a 
big change to support Unicode on the clipboard to install (which has 
more benefits to users than file names IMHO).


>(let ((file-name-coding-system 'raw-text))
>  (directory-files DIRECTORY_NAME))
>
>returns `?' in file names if they are encoded in utf-16-le?
>  
>