Re: opening files with unicode characters in the file name on windows

[Mathias Dahl]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> > From: Mathias Dahl <brakjoller@hotmail.com>
> > Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> > Date: 03 Aug 2004 08:32:15 +0200
> > 
> > > Does (setq file-name-coding-system 'utf-8) help?
> > 
> > No, even though it was a very interesting option. When I set
> > that variable I can *save* files and the file names looks
> > very cryptic in explorer.exe, probably because Windows use
> > UTF-16
 
> Your original message said ``file names with Unicode
> characters''.  Can you tell what characters are those, and
> why do you think they are encoded in some Unicode-related
> encoding, like UTF-16?

Well, I have been surfing around for a couple of weeks ago
since I have had to debug some unicode-issues in our
applications. Everywhere I go I rad about how Microsoft uses
unicode internally for string, and also in file names. And
as they say that they use UTF-16 for strings and file
content I just supposed they used it for encoding file names
too. But of course I man be wrong. And I really mean that as
I am a complete beginner when it comes to unicode.

> Can you look at the file's name as recorded in the
> directory with some low-level tool that actually shows the
> byte values that encode the file's name?

No, but I would really like to. :)
 
> You see, I suspect that Windows file names are encoded in
> the system codepage, not in UTF-16.  So perhaps setting
> file-name-coding-system to that codepage would solve the
> problem.

Hmm, ok. I will try that, I just have to figure out which
code page I am currently using. Thanks for the tip, I will
report back my findings here.

Btw, is there some more "low-level" way of opening files in
Emacs so that I can open ANY file regardless of how the file
name is encoded?

/Mathias