in reply to Re^6: Writing UTF8 Filename (Win32)
in thread Writing UTF8 Filename
Wow. That would suck, IMHO. Talk about a complicated mess of an over-designed system.
I don't think it would suck or is over designed. In the common case, you would use file functions like you do now, and Perl handles everything transparently. ${^FS_ENCODING} would default to auto, resulting in autodetection for the entire system. When you want to port your latin1 mp3 collection to utf8 (to name one real world case), it would be exceptionally easy to do so: given proper OS support it would detect the encodings automatically, and without the OS support you can still override them with two lines of code.
The problem with ANY win32-only code, or any-platform-only code, is that you put the burden of writing portable applications on the programmer. Hence, some abstraction would be nice. If only perl provided useful hooks for encoding filenames in general, that would be a great start, and also provide nice ways of dealing with existing systems. Program written to support only absolute filenames? Hack hack, and it does what you want.