Re: [gtkmm] One thing we didn't really discuss: ustring vs string

[Joe Yandle <jwy divisionbyzero com>]

> > 
> > Why can filenames never be UTF8? I thought one of the reasons for 
> > creating UTF8 was to be able to use Unicode in Unix filenames, avoiding 
> > the null-terminated string problems of using a 16-bit wide character 
> > Unicode encoding.
> 
> Maybe because other systems can't cope with UTF8? I think, for instance,
> that UTF8 can have null bytes in the middle. I'm not 100% sure whether
> filenames can be UTF8. Other people seem to be sure that they can't, so
> I defer to them.
> 

UTF8 was designed to allow UNIX systems to use multibyte charsets without
the inner null bytes of unicode.  Here's a current UTF8/UCS primer:

    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

The linux kernel has supported UTF8 in the vfat filesystem since v2.0:
 
    http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.0/doc/filesystems/vfat.txt.html:

VFAT MOUNT OPTIONS
----------------------------------------------------------------------
..
utf8	      -- UTF8 is the filesystem safe version of Unicode that
		 is used by the console.  It can be enabled for the
		 filesystem with this option. If 'uni_xlate' gets set,
		 UTF8 gets disabled.


cheers,
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