From: johan556@...
Date: 2007-07-06T01:32:01+09:00
Subject: Re: File.unlink(nonwestern_filename) ---> Error on Windows

On 7/5/07, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 5, 2007, at 8:00 AM, johan556@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > I use Ruby on Windows, and tried to remove all files in a directory
> > with the code given below. But if the directory contains files with
> > filenames having non-western characters the operation fails.
> >
>
> First make sure you set the KCODE
>

Using KCODE does not change anything. I have tried:

  $ ruby -Ke rm-files.rb
  $ ruby -Ks rm-files.rb
  $ ruby -Ku rm-files.rb
  $ ruby -Ka rm-files.rb
  $ ruby -Kn rm-files.rb

The problematic files are stored with a name that is a 16-bit
character string in NTFS (what I called Unicode in my earlier mail,
perhaps one should call it "almost UTF-16" or UCS-2, I don't know the
finer details). Anyway, I don't think setting KCODE solves my problem.

> Try using the chars class from ActiveSupport (yes it is a gem that is
> part of Rails but it provides a great deal of utf-8 processing)
>

See above. I don't think NTFS stores Unicode filenames in UTF-8.

My assumption when starting to look at this problem was: that a
filename that I got from one function (Dir.entries) would be directly
usable in another function (File.unlink). That was quite naive I
realize :)

But it is still a real problem. As it is now, FileUtils.rm_r does not
work on an arbitrary file-tree. As soon as it contains a file with
"wrong" filename it fails. Maybe this is just a consequence of the way
Ruby is ported to Windows.

/Johan Holmberg