fopen and encoding of "*filename" argument.

Hi,

I have a c program which opens a file and copies bytes in this file to another. This can be run in many locales. It uses fopen() to open the file. The first argument to fopen() is const char* which is name/path of the file to open. What should be the encoding of this argument? Should it be in the encoding of the locale?

Thanks,
Vivek.

I would think the filename would be encoded in whatever language is set up on the computer, or however the user wants to see the filenames on the disk in WindowsExplorer, which may or may not be in the same language. So I don't see how you need to worry about encoding at all -- C standards specify char*, so the characters of whatever language is used must fit in an unsigned char (not wchar_t).

I have the filename in UTF8 encoding. Hence I need to convert it to the encoding which fopen() understands for the first argument, i.e. const char*. If I convert it to locale encoding lets say Japanese, then the bytes in the filename argument will be different than that if I convert it to some other locale encoding e.g. French.

Please note that my concern is NOT about the stream/data in the file. I am talking about just first argument of fopen()

Thanks,
Vivek.

Is this in the ballpark of your question?

If you have file to test on why not test it?