Can I display Chinese character filenemes in an

Robin Rosenberg robin.rosenberg.lists at dewire.com
Wed Oct 6 21:32:23 BST 2004


On Wednesday 06 October 2004 20.54, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> I do note two things:
>
> The first 256 glyphs of Unicode *are* the same as ISO8859-1.

Yes. Note the difference between an abstract character and a
way of representing that character in a computer. There are many
encodings for unicode. UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-2 (old), UCS-32. The latter
three also come in big-endian and little endian versions. 

A filename in linux is a sequence of bytes without any encoding attached. The
machine only sees the byte sequence and cannot know what encoding should
be used. For the OS and most apps it doesn't matter. The user will see garbage 
if the wrong assumption (your default locale) is applied when presenting 
filenames, At best some characters may be readable.

Som non-native filesystems like VFAT, NTFS, JFS actually have a defined 
character encoding so that your systems default character set does not matter
as much.

> It appears that KDE's clipboard converts to UTF-8 automatically.

Yes it does. I think the clipboard uses UTF-8. KDE however uses UTF-16
internally and converts when necessary. In some cases that leads to data
loss. Gnome, one the other hand is UTF-8 based.

-- robin
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