Re^3: how to unicode filenames?

[zentara]

Hi, I would like to share my Unicode battles with you, since we both are fighting the same battle it seems. After a few unicode related posts, yours being one of them, I decided to try and make a little utility I wrote, named vgrep, unicode aware. It was quite a hit or miss transformation. See Gtk2 Visual Grep

I has to add the -CS perlrun switch, use the unicode::all module, and even after all that, I still needed to use $Encode::decode() in many places to get the desired output.

Even though my linux filesystem locale is en_US.UTF-8 in my .bashrc, I still needed to run input strings and filenames thru decode. I'm using Perl 5.14.1.

It works, but it definitely seems to my sensibilities that it should be simpler. I guess the problem comes from having many files and filenames comng in thru the net, and left over from previous Latin-1 linux installations, which are not UTF-8.

The general rule I seem to be seeing is "treat all input as binary" then decode. My vgrep program still emits some errors when searching thru pdf files, which are detected as being -t text, but contain binary images; and I don't understand why File::Find dosn't automatically see unicode filenames, without having to decode $File::Find::name.

[Corion]

File::Find does not automatically "see" (or return) unicode filenames, because for Perl there is no way to know that what the file system APIs return is UTF-8-encoded text. If you are certain that this is always the case, I guess you can wrap your own decode() wrapper around it, but I see it breaking for many situations where different filesystems with different filename encodings come together.

[perl-diddler]

A quick suggestion: You have -CS, but for a 'find', you might want to evaluate if -CSA would be a better choice for such a program.