Internationalization issues when interfacing to Wine

[John Emmas <johne53 tiscali co uk>]

Our application runs on Windows and Linux.  In both cases we might sometimes need to launch a third-party (Windows) application.  Obviously, in the Linux version this would get launched using Wine or something similar.

Suppose we need to pass a file path to the third-party app.  In the Windows version we can use g_locale_from_utf8() which conveniently converts between glib's internal path representation (UTF8) to create a locale-specific path which the third-party app will understand.

But what about if we need to do this in the Linux version??  AFAICT g_locale_from_utf8() will effectively do nothing in this situation - so Wine will send the app a UTF8 path (unless Wine itself is clever enough to do a conversion).  Or to put it another way, paths going between glib and Wine will only work if they contain entirely American / English characters.  They probably won't work if they contain accented characters etc.

Is there a recommended strategy for handling this scenario?  Thanks.

John