Re: non-ascii filenames issue

[demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com>]

2009/4/6 Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se>:
> John Tapsell:
>
>> Unfortunately not, because for some absolutely crazy reason, there is no
>> way at all to tell what encoding the string is in.  It never occured to
>> anyone that it might actually be useful to be able to read the filename in
>> an unambiguous way.
>
> It comes from the Unix tradition, unfortunately, that file names are just a
> stream of bytes, instead of a stream of characters mapped to a byte
> sequence. The "stream of bytes" think worked back when everyone used ASCII,
> but as soon as other character encodings were used (i.e back in the 1970s or
> so), that assumption broke.

Those interested in this subject may find the following document on
the creation of utf8 interesting.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

cheers,
Yves

-- 
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"