From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-11-15T00:12:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on win32 cannot handle certain filenames

On 11/13/06, David Barri <japgolly@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is my first post in any one the ruby forums :)
>
> I have a serious ruby windows problem. When I use IO related calls (such
> as Dir.glob, File.open, etc) on my machine (WinXP), filenames are always
> returned in the shift_jis charset. I've been using iconv to convert to
> utf8 but then I came across a much more serious problem: because
> File.open is using the shift_jis charset for filenames, it is NOT
> POSSIBLE (!) for Ruby to open files that have say European chars in the
> filename!! In this day and age SURELY it cannot be the case that it's
> not possible in Ruby! It must be my inexperience :) There must be some
> way that I don't know about. Any ideas/opinions/suggestions?
>
> Also, I've tried changing the KCODE but it has absolutely no effect on
> Dir.glob or Flie.open.
>
> Also, when I used Dir.glob, Japanese filenames worked fine but one file
> that had an � in it (e with umlat) had been converted somewhere in
> ruby's internals to just a plain ASCII e. There must be some way to
> disable this internal charset conversion.

You're correct.

This is a limitation of Ruby as it is currently built. I haven't had
time to check whether Matz has m17n Strings in, but this will not be
fixable in Ruby 1.8 without using a Unicode string extension and a
significant overhaul to the Windows code.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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               * austin@zieglers.ca