[Openmcl-devel] special characters in filenames - Carbon support

[Gary Byers]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Thomas Hummel wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I use openMCL 1.1 on an Intel Mac. I want to read and write files with 
> special characters in the file name like "ä". Is this possible? E.g., I load 
> a file made with Aquamacs from a terminal shell (load "myfile"). It contains 
> a line like
>
> (probe-file "/Users/thomashummel/ändern.lisp")
>
> It doesn't find the file although the file exists at this place.

At least on OSX, things like OPEN and PROBE-FILE really should encode
namestrings in UTF-8 before passing them off to the file system.  (I'm
pretty sure that this is true regardless of the file system type, and
that some VFS layer handles the issue of mapping UTF-8 pathnames to
whatever native convention the filesystem supports, handling decomposition/
precomposition, etc.)  I suspect that this is also true of FreeBSD (where
some of the VFS ideas came from); I'm not sure that it's true of Linux,
where a filename is probably just an arbitrary, NUL-terminated sequence
of octets (and no assumptions are made about how those octets relate
to any character encoding.)

None of this (UTF-8 conversion) currently happens.  Since OSX expects
UTF-8, the presence of the single 8-bit character in your example just
makes the namestring look like poorly encoded UTF-8 and things don't work ...

Fixing this (by changing the half-dozen or so things that pass namestrings
to/receive namestrings from the OS to assume that those namestrings are
UTF-8 encoded) is fairly straightforward and is clearly the right thing
for OSX (and probably FreeBSD).  Does anyone have a sense of whether
this would be the right thing for Linux as well ?  (E.g., whether Linux
namestrings that contain non-ASCII characters are usually in fact
UTF-8 encoded or not ?)

>
> Too, it is said that openMCL supports Carbon. For example, how can I invoke 
> the Carbon function FSRenameUnicode (in Digitool CL it was (#_FSRenameUnicode 
> ....)

OpenMCL on Intel hardware is currently only available as a 64-bit
application.  Apple has not provided 64-bit versions of any GUI libraries
to date and has announced that the forthcoming Leopard release will
provide a 64-bit version of Cocoa but not of Carbon.

People have done things with Carbon and OpenMCL on PPC32 in the past.


>
> Thanks for help
> Thomas Hummel
>
>