AW: filenames on MS Windows

[Bastian M. <bma...@we...>]

Right now, gnuplot is able to "load" file names with Unicode encoded names, i.e. the sequence
	set encoding utf8
	load 'абвгдежзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюяѐёђѓєѕіїјљњћќѝўџ.plt'
will work just fine. Only loading via the command line does not work and that should indeed be improved. (I don't agree to use glib for that purpose - but that is easy to change).

  Bastian

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Allin Cottrell <cot...@wf...>
> Gesendet: Sonntag, 1. November 2020 21:24
> An: Ethan A Merritt <me...@uw...>
> Cc: gnuplot-beta <gnu...@li...>
> Betreff: Re: filenames on MS Windows
> 
> On Sun, 1 Nov 2020, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> 
> > On Saturday, 31 October 2020 17:36:03 PST Allin Cottrell wrote:
> >> On Sun, 25 Oct 2020, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> >>
> >>> I tried googling this but didn't find an answer -- sorry if I should
> >>> have just tried harder! My question is: can gnuplot on Windows
> >>> handle a unicode filename argument passed in UTF-16? As in
> >>>
> >>> path/to/wgnuplot.exe <UTF-16 input filename>
> >>
> >> OK, that question was under-researched, but now I've done my
> >> homework. Sorry, this is a bit long but I hope I can arouse some
> >> interest in the topic.
> >
> > I don't have any direct insight into this issue other than to note
> > that the filesytem itself may be an issue.
> 
> In some contexts, no doubt. But if we set aside exotica such as surrogate pairs,
> NTFS filenames are UTF-16 to a very good approximation. As such they are
> easily converted to UTF-8 to permit handling with good old C char * APIs, and
> easily converted back to
> UTF-16 for _wfopen() if required.
> 
> > The following entry from the R developer blog is of interest
> >
> >
> > https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/2020/05/02/utf-8-support-o
> > n-windows/
> >
> > I gather from the discussion there that Windows-10 can be made to
> > support UTF-8 as a native encoding, calling it "extended ASCII".
> 
> Interesting, yes, but at this point kinda science fiction. The practical issue at
> present is whether gnuplot wants to support out-of-codepage UTF-16
> filenames on the Windows command line. It's not terribly difficult, as I tried to
> show.
> 
> Sorry if I'm being repetitive, but right now if a create, say, a Russian-language
> filename on Windows and pass it as command-line argument to gnuplot,
> gnuplot will not be able to open the file because its name cannot be
> represented in my "system codepage". A program that reads the command line
> as UTF-16, however, will have no problem opening the file.
> 
> Allin Cottrell