If you thought JavaScript was a mess, here's what it takes to pass a file path to a Windows API in C++: 🧵
- Windows uses UTF-16, but most modern software uses UTF-8
- Converting UTF-8 to UTF-16 requires calling MultiByteToWideChar twice (once for size, second to convert)
- Alternatively you can set the process code page to UTF-8 and call the 'A' variant API directly, but only sometimes, and only with Windows 10 v1903+, and you might still have to change the system locale setting and reboot
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It’s better and worse at the same time: it just doesn’t bother with it for the most part. If you have files named with UTF-8 characters, and run it with a locale that uses an ISO-whatever charset, it just displays them wrong. As long as the byte is not a zero or an ASCII forward slash, it’ll take it.
There’s still a path length limit but it’s bigger: 255 bytes for filenames and 4096 bytes for a whole path. That’s bytes, not characters. So if you use UTF-16 like on Windows, those numbers are halved.
That said, it’s assumed to be UTF-8 these days and should be interpreted as UTF-8, nobody uses non-UTF-8 locales anymore. But you technically can.
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I assume this is not thr case for Linux
Linux APIs are 8bit, instead of 16bit, however the filesystem encoding can be anything if the user wants.
In practice we all use UTF-8 but correct software has to encode to the correct one just in case.
There is also still a max path length, but it’s longer like 4096.
It’s better and worse at the same time: it just doesn’t bother with it for the most part. If you have files named with UTF-8 characters, and run it with a locale that uses an ISO-whatever charset, it just displays them wrong. As long as the byte is not a zero or an ASCII forward slash, it’ll take it.
There’s still a path length limit but it’s bigger: 255 bytes for filenames and 4096 bytes for a whole path. That’s bytes, not characters. So if you use UTF-16 like on Windows, those numbers are halved.
That said, it’s assumed to be UTF-8 these days and should be interpreted as UTF-8, nobody uses non-UTF-8 locales anymore. But you technically can.