From: Nobuyoshi Nakada <nobu@...>
Date: 2006-11-15T01:44:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on win32 cannot handle certain filenames

Hi,

At Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:28:58 +0900,
David Barri wrote in [ruby-talk:224879]:
> 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.

Do you use Japanese version Windows?  Those methods use "OEM
string" but have no shift_jis specific code.

> 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?

If your system runs with European 8-bit charset, it should work
by setting $KCODE to "N".

> Also, I've tried changing the KCODE but it has absolutely no effect on 
> Dir.glob or Flie.open.

$KCODE is for internal use, typically Regexp.

> Also, when I used Dir.glob, Japanese filenames worked fine but one file 
> that had an 谷 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.

Not ruby's internals, it's done in Windows kernel.

-- 
Nobu Nakada