Re: Filename encoding

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>
>> Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 13:14:39 -0500
>> Cc: guile-user@gnu.org
>> 
>> My hope is that this will become less of an issue over time, as systems
>> increasingly standardize on UTF-8.  I see no other good solution.
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>
> MS-Windows filesystems will not standardize on UTF-8 in any observable
> future.

Well, I understand that MS has standardized on UTF-16 (right?) but what
matters from Guile's perspective is the encoding used by the POSIX-style
interfaces that Guile uses, such as 'open'.  Do you know what encoding
that is on Windows?

> Likewise, in some Far Eastern cultures, non-UTF encoding are still
> widely used.

*nod*

> An "other good solution" is to decode file names into Unicode based
> representation (which can be UTF-8) for internal handling, then encode
> them back into the locale-specific encoding when passing them to
> system calls and library functions that receive file names.  This is
> what Emacs does.

That's what Guile does too.  Internally, all strings are Unicode.  At
present we use either Latin-1 or UTF-32, but I intend to change the
internal representation to UTF-8 at some point.

   Thanks,
     Mark