Re: [xml] Default Catalog On Windows, Deprecated API

[Igor Zlatkovic <igor zlatkovic com>]

On 14.06.2004 20:25, Mark_Vakoc peoplesoft com wrote:
> I don't know how much that matters -- down the road libxml2 uses the C API
> (fopen. etc) which takes a const char* and does not support UTF-8 encoded
> filenames anyways, at least not the ms runtime, so even if you used the
> wide version of GetModuleFileNameW and converted it to UTF-8 the end result
> is that the C file apis would fail anywyas.  The only place that would
> benefit from that are custum i/o handlers that may properly use UTF-8
> encoded paths.

It was a crazy thought, yes.

In fact, functions which accept any strings other than Unicode don't 
really exist in the NT incarnation of Windows. They all convert their 
parameters to Unicode (UTF-16LE) and then call their Unicode-enabled 
sisters to do the actual work.

Thes means, every program which doesn't use the native Unicode API has a 
penalty of one string conversion and one function call whenever it calls 
an API function which accepts or returns a string.

So is fopen. Its implementation ends up calling the native API 
CreateFileA and that one will convert the file name to Unicode and call 
CreateFileW. Or, perhaps fopen will convert the file name and call 
wfopen. The source will tell which is the case, but it doesn't matter. 
In every case the conversion is done using the current locale and if you 
had an UTF-8 locale...

But again, it was a crazy thought. Windows doesn't have UTF-8 in any 
locale anyway. :-) I don't know why, perhaps because UTF-8 is Unicode 
after all.

Ciao,
Igor