> Many third-party libraries for Windows do not support Unicode: they accept narrow string parameters and pass them to the ANSI API. Sometimes, even for file names. In the general case, it is impossible to work around this, as a string may not be representable completely in any ANSI code page (if it contains characters from a mix of Unicode blocks). What is normally done by Windows programmers for file names is getting an 8.3 path to the file (if it already exists) and feeding it into such a library. It is not possible if the library is supposed to create a non-existing file.
Yikes. That's a fascinating use of 8.3 paths. Sometimes when I look at really old Windows cruft I wonder when it will go away. 8.3 paths seemed like an easy thing to get rid of, but with 8.3 paths used to hack around encoding issues in 3rd party libraries... that's going to stick around...
Anyone know which libraries this is talking about?
Yikes. That's a fascinating use of 8.3 paths. Sometimes when I look at really old Windows cruft I wonder when it will go away. 8.3 paths seemed like an easy thing to get rid of, but with 8.3 paths used to hack around encoding issues in 3rd party libraries... that's going to stick around...
Anyone know which libraries this is talking about?