Re: How to detect the encoding of a string?

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 08:29:24PM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote:

> Forcing the Linux system call interface to require valid UTF-8 would
> be a fantastic extension to POSIX.  (Generic, not per-filesystem.)

I do agree, however, it'd introduce several nontrivial problems that'd still
needed to be solved somehow:

- zip extracting :-), web/ftp/rsync mirroring etc. could cause files not to
be extracted/mirrored.

- What to do with non-UTF8 files that already exists on the disk? Should
e2fsck, reiserfsck etc. also force filenames to be UTF-8? Could they still
be accessible somehow? Would readdir() return them?

- Is it then sane to limit filename length to a fixed number of bytes
instead of a fixed number of characters then?

- Would one of NFC and NFD be forced (à la MacOS)?

Perhaps there are other problems as well...


Once I also heard a fantastic idea from someone: this could (at least
temporarily till everyone switches to UTF-8) be a per-filesystem mount
option instead of a global kernel variable or hardcoded to the kernel. This
way when you mount a filesystem, you could specify whether or not UTF-8 is
forced there.



-- 
Egmont

--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/