Re: filenames on MS Windows

On Sun, 1 Nov 2020, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> On Saturday, 31 October 2020 17:36:03 PST Allin Cottrell wrote:
>> On Sun, 25 Oct 2020, Allin Cottrell wrote:
>>
>>> I tried googling this but didn't find an answer -- sorry if I should have
>>> just tried harder! My question is: can gnuplot on Windows handle a unicode
>>> filename argument passed in UTF-16? As in
>>>
>>> path/to/wgnuplot.exe <UTF-16 input filename>
>>
>> OK, that question was under-researched, but now I've done my
>> homework. Sorry, this is a bit long but I hope I can arouse some
>> interest in the topic.
>
> I don't have any direct insight into this issue other than to note
> that the filesytem itself may be an issue.

In some contexts, no doubt. But if we set aside exotica such as 
surrogate pairs, NTFS filenames are UTF-16 to a very good 
approximation. As such they are easily converted to UTF-8 to permit 
handling with good old C char * APIs, and easily converted back to 
UTF-16 for _wfopen() if required.

> The following entry from the R developer blog is of interest
>
>   https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/2020/05/02/utf-8-support-on-windows/
>
> I gather from the discussion there that Windows-10 can be made to
> support UTF-8 as a native encoding, calling it "extended ASCII".

Interesting, yes, but at this point kinda science fiction. The 
practical issue at present is whether gnuplot wants to support 
out-of-codepage UTF-16 filenames on the Windows command line. It's 
not terribly difficult, as I tried to show.

Sorry if I'm being repetitive, but right now if a create, say, a 
Russian-language filename on Windows and pass it as command-line 
argument to gnuplot, gnuplot will not be able to open the file 
because its name cannot be represented in my "system codepage". A 
program that reads the command line as UTF-16, however, will have no 
problem opening the file.

Allin Cottrell


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