charset issue on Windows help needed

[Geert Janssens <info kobaltwit be>]

Hi,

I'm stuck on the following issue. Program is GnuCash on Windows.

Consider the following code snippet:

struct stat statbuf;
gchar* dirname = g_strdup(g_getenv("GNC_DOTGNUCASH_DIR");
gint rc = g_stat (dirname, &statbuf);

switch (errno)
{
  case ENOENT:
    // Directory doesn't exist
    // Here is code to create it which I cut for brevity
    break;

  case EACCES:
    // Directory can't be accessed
    exit(1);

  case ENOTDIR:
    // Not a directory
    exit(1);

  default:
    // Unknown error
    exit(1);
}

// Continue code with valid, existing directory
...

So this snippet reads the value of environment variable GNC_DOTGNUCASH_DIR and tests 
whether this is a valid directory.

This works fine when GNC_DOTGNUCASH_DIR uses a limited character set like ascii. For 
example when set to "c:\gcdev\geert" this works well and the code continues.

However if set to for example:
c:\gcdev\Łukasz
Things go wrong (note the unusual Ł).

In this case the code branches into case ENOENT and creates a directory named
c:\gcdev\Lukasz (note the plain L now)
Before it continues.

Setting a breakpoint at rc=g_stat... and examining the value of dirname at that point also 
shows it to have a value of c:\gcdev\Lukasz (with plain L).

So it seems I'm losing diacritical information here and I can't pass the right directory to my code 
to use.

What should I do to get the real value from the environment to be able to access the true 
directory ?

Thanks,

Geert

P.S. my locale settings are all "Dutch_Belgium.1252" except for LC_ALL which is empty.