2009/4/6 Peter Krefting <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > 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/" -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html