unicode filenames

[Neil Hodgson]

Andrew Dalke:

> BTW, how do I test your assertion the RedHat uses UTF-8 for filename
> encoding?  I can't figure that out.  I did figure out one problem
> is that I need to say "en_US.UTF-8" instead of "en_US.utf-8".

   Red Hat defaults the locale to <something>.UTF-8 whch on my machine is
en_US.UTF-8. Then they ship most of the utilities and bundled applications
compiled or configured for UTF-8. Mostly this depends on using GNOME 2
applications which use UTF-8 as their normal string type.

   For PEP 277, there was a test script which produces files with Unicode
names on Windows. I have changed it a bit to run on Linux producing UTF-8
names.
   The Linux version of the script:
http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/unilin.py
   A screenshot from Windows with what the files look like when the original
script is run along with the Linux script displayed in SciTE:
http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/winss.png
   A screenshot from Red Hat Linux 8.0 with, on the left, Nautilus showing a
directory on VFAT where the Windows script was run (displaying the ASCII,
European, and Cyrillic well, the Greek with one problem on an accented
character, the Hebrew invisibly, and the Japanese and Chinese as code
blocks), Nautilus showing a directory on ext3 where the Linux script was run
(similar to VFAT case), an ls in a console (Cyrillic and European are
displayed well). On the right hand side are two editors, gedit is a GNOME 2
application so works similarly to Nautilus; SciTE is a GTK+ 1.x application
with some Unicode fontset support.
   http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/linuxss.png
   Linux would look a lot better if I had some Asian Unicode fonts
installed.

   Neil