How to open file in PHP that has unicode characters in its name?

Question

For example I have a filename like this - проба.xml and I am unable to open it from PHP script.

If I setup php script to be in utf-8 than all the text in script is utf-8 thus when I pass this to file_get_contents:

$fname = "проба.xml";
file_get_contents($fname);

I get error that file does not exist. The reason for this is that in Windows (XP) all file names with non-latin characters are unicode (UTF-16). OK so I tried this:

$fname = "проба.xml";
$res = mb_convert_encoding($fname,'UTF-8','UTF-16');
file_get_contents($res);

But the error persists since file_get_contents can not accept unicode strings...

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You could try:

• getting the string for the filename from a directory listing using opendir and readdir
• passing that string to file_get _contents to see if that will work, or
• try getting the content of the file using fopen, fread and fclose

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

These are conclusions so far:

1. PHP 5 can not open filename with unicode characters unless the source filename is unicode.
2. PHP 5 (at least on windows XP) is not able to process PHP source in unicode.

Thus the conclusion this not doable in PHP 5.