Re: Can someone please comment on this short program

[Matthias Kaeppler <matthias finitestate org>]

Nelson Benítez wrote:
> On Tue, December 13, 2005 1:39 pm, Murray Cumming said:
>
> > > Some tips for encoding charsets troubles:
> >
> > Isn't this for file contents, not file names?
>
>
>  Yes, I think the problem is the emacs c file that contain the filename is
> on iso-8859-x and so the filename, while if the c file were in utf8 and
> so the filename then didn't failed. That's what I understood.

The whole point isn't about Emacs anyway. The problem to my 
understanding lies in the Uri class expecting UTF-8 encoded strings, 
while FileInfo handling strings in the locale's encoding; both don't go 
well together for non-ASCII characters.

Example:
You read the file 'äöü' from the disk which name is encoded in ISO-8859-15:

  // returns std::string in the locale's encoding
  std::string filename = dirhandle.read_next()->get_name();

You want to create an URI object from this filename, but...

  // error! Invalid byte sequence in conversion input
  RefPtr<Uri> uri = Uri::create(filename);

Uri::create() expects UTF-8, so you /have/ to convert the filename to 
UTF-8 using the glib conversion functions:

  RefPtr<Uri> uri = Uri::create(filename_to_utf8(filename));

No conversion error anymore, but now the Uri object is effectively 
useless, because it doesn't point to an existing entity anymore; there 
is no file on the system by the name the conversion yields.

And /that/ is the dilemma; regardless how you bend and turn it, one of 
the actions will fail.

- Matthias