Re: NSProcessInfo.m: Unicode compliance of _gnu_process_args()

[Roland Schwingel]

Hi Richard....

> I think not ...
> 
> The argument/environment strings are, (by definition since they are
 
> coming from outside the program), in the external character encoding.
 
> The initWithCString: method initialises a string with data in the
 
> external character encoding.  The current code should therefore
be  
> correct whatever the external encoding is.
> 
> If you changed the code to use initWithUTF8String: it would be wrong
 
> on any system where UTF8 is not used as the external character coding.
> 
> NB. NSString determines the external character encoding from standard
 
> environment variables, and those variable names and values are by
 
> definition ASCII, and are accessed via plain C functions and should
 
> therefore work irrespective of the external character encoding in
use.
> 
Well...

Imagine you call [NSProcessInfo initializeWithArguments:
(char**)argv count: (int)argc environment: (char**)env];
on either Linux or Windows. In both Operatingsystems
you ensure that argv[x] and/or env[x] contains utf8 encoded
strings. What do you think what happens? The strings
are trashed...

It can happen that your application runs in an environment
where ut8 is uncommon/not set or not the external encoding
(like on Windows), then NSString would fallback to
ISOLatin1 (as far as I remeber) and that would break
the utf8.

I wrote because I exactly have these problems frequently.
I need to work with files (eg. on my german windows),
that reside on drives with pathes containing unicode
characters. Even I might not be able to display the
pathes in explorer correctly at any time, I am able
to open the files, copy them or whatever I like to do
when working unicode save, and utf-8 is (mostly) the
best way to handle everything between the worlds.

It might also happen that my app (containing ALL libraries)
is in an unicode path, so I wrote especially because of that,
because than the NSProcessInfo thingy comes to live
for me...

Roland