[Afpfs-ng-devel] accented characters in UTF-8 filenames

[Michael U. <mu...@re...>]

Hi Alex,
Hi list,

from what I've learned today MAC OSX volumes (HFS+) use decomposed UTF-8 
characters in file and directory names (base character and accent are 
not encoded as a single multibyte character [precomposed Unicode], but 
instead the base character stands for itself and is followed by a 
multibyte "accent only" character [decomposed Unicode]).

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1173.html gives some comments on 
this topic.

When mounting a OSX volume from a linux box via afp-client, I get a 
correct listing of volume names in a terminal set to UTF-8 charset, even 
if accented characters are contained in the names.

Saving this listing output to a text file and trying to convert this 
file from UTF-8 to a different charset (e.g. ISO-8859-2) with recode or 
iconv leads to 'invalid input' error messages.

Maybe I'm completely wrong here and somehow don't see the obvious ... 
OTOH I feel that there should be some decomposed -> precomposed 
conversion in afpfs-ng (or somewhere else on the OSX side ...?) to 
deliver filenames in 'standard' (precomposed) UTF-8, which are correctly 
coded for further processing on the linux side.

Please let me know, if I shall provide further information or give any 
other assistance.

Best regards ... Michael