Re: Filename Encoding

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 12:38:04PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:

     I understand now.  However, in other places in PSPP, and in particular
     in syntax and the output engine, we tend to convert everything we
     receive externally into UTF-8 for internal processing, and then convert
     back to other encodings as necessary.  It would be convenient for some
     purposes to do this for filenames also (e.g. to include file names in
     output), and it would avoid needing to keep around two pieces of
     information (file name plus encoding) when one (UTF-8 file name) would
     do.  

     Do you think that storing file name plus encoding is superior?

Both solutions have advantages and disadvantages.

The converting-all-filenames-to-utf8 solution has two disadvantages that I
can see:

*.  Unnecessary recoding - often it will be necessary to convert from "filename 
encoding"
    to utf8 and then, back to "filename encoding".


*.  The bigger disadvantage, is that it will be very easy simply to forget to do
the necessary conversion.  If the programmer forgets - the compiler won't 
complain - 
it is just a char *   - Passing a struct file_handle * one cannot forget - 
there'll
be a compiler error.

J'

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