Re: [gtkmm] UTF8 filenames? (Was One thing we didn't really discuss: ustring vs string)

[Sebastian Rittau <srittau jroger in-berlin de>]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 06:14:21PM +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:

> But this, from ChangeLog suggests that Daniel knew what he was doing:
> 
> 2002-06-15  Daniel Elstner  <daniel elstner gmx net>
> 
> 	* gtk/src/fileselection.hg (set_filename): Change the filename
> 	argument type to std::string.  The get_filename/set_filename
> 	inconsistency has been fixed in GTK+ 2.0.4.

Maybe I can explain a bit, since I was the one that did originally
submit that bug report to gtk+. Normally all gtk+ passed to and from
gtk+ are UTF-8 encoded. This is not true for the [gs]et_filename methods
of GtkFileSelection. These expect the filename in the filename encoding
(i.e. in this case the same encoding the open() call expects), which is
then internally tranformed to UTF-8. (This was broken in versions prior
to 2.0.5.)

So, at least if you don't plan to do the filename encoding <-> UTF-8
conversion yourself (which I would recommend against[1]), you have to
use an all-purpose string as argument/return value to [gs]et_filename.
Filenames can be in any encoding, including UTF-8.

 - Sebastian

[1] For convenience reasons. This way you can simply write stuff like:

      filename = dialog->get_filename ();
      fd = open (filename);

    Otherwise you'd had to convert filename first.