Re: address@hidden: setting utf-16 as file-name-coding-system locks up emacs]

[Jason Rumney]

Kenichi Handa wrote:

In article <address@hidden>, Mattis <address@hidden> writes:

  

 Are they real question marks?  Have you checked them with
 "C-x ="?
      

Yes, they are real question marks.
    

 
Hmmm, then something is different in Windows port.
  

I do not know how to proceed. It definitely seems like the low level
emacs functions do not support all characters under Windows. Is this
considered a bug or a non-feature?
    

I have no idea because I have almost no knowledge about
Windows.  Jason, do you know why

  

The functions that deal with file names in the C library on Windows return ? for characters that are not supported by the system locale, even though NTFS supports Unicode file names. The answer would be to use Unicode-aware Win32 API functions instead of the standard C library, but such functions are only supported on some versions of Windows, so determining when to use them and when not to is a problem.

It is quite unusual for users to enter filenames in languages other than their own, and Emacs is certainly not the only application that has this problem (try "dir" in the windows command prompt for example), so this has not been high priority. It is probably appropriate to look at this in the next version of Emacs that uses Unicode internally. To do so now is too big a change for feature-freeze, I think and we already have a big change to support Unicode on the clipboard to install (which has more benefits to users than file names IMHO).

(let ((file-name-coding-system 'raw-text))
  (directory-files DIRECTORY_NAME))

returns `?' in file names if they are encoded in utf-16-le?