Re: AW: filenames on MS Windows

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Mon, 2 Nov 2020, Bastian Märkisch wrote:

> Allin,
>
> Thank you for this nice contribution.  On Windows, we already replace
> fopen() (and many other functions), though.  In particular, win_fopen() in
> winmain.c already handles encodings, including UTF-8. There are also two
> functions AnsiText() and UnicodeText() to convert to/from UTF16 according to
> gnuplot's encoding.

Yes, I'm aware of that and it's a very nice feature.

> They use the simple-to-use Windows functions
> WideCharToMultiByte() MultiByteToWideChar(), so no need for glib.

Ah, OK.

> That really poses the question if we should change the default internal
> encoding from "ANSI" (whatever that may be depends on the Windows locale) to
> UTF-8.  I agree with that (and in fact my personal gnuplot.ini includes "set
> encoding utf8" since a long time).
>
> But how do we make this backward compatible since that will inevitably break
> load commands in old "ANSI" encoded user scripts? (as does your current
> patch btw)

Are you sure about that breakage, Bastian? I may be missing 
something, but here's my thinking: (1) I convert UTF-16 -> UTF-8 
only for filenames coming off the Windows command-line in winmain.c, 
and (2) in my modified loadpath_fopen() I first try fopen() on the 
filename as-is, converting UTF-8 -> UTF-16 and calling _wfopen() 
only if fopen() fails and the filename validates as UTF-8. So I 
don't _think_ my patch is going to touch filenames read via the load 
command in a gnuplot script.

Allin Cottrell