PHP detecting filesystem encoding

Question

Hi guys,

I need to save files with non-latin filenames on a filesytem, using PHP.

I want to make this work cross-platform. How do I know what encoding I can use to write the file? I understand many modern filesystems are UTF-8 based (is this correct?), but I doubt Windows XP is (for instance).

So, is there a robust detection mechanism?

Evert

Answer 1

Not an answer to your question, but if you don't need to do extensive operations on filesystem level (like searching, sorting...), there is a nice cross-platform workaround for the issue outlined in this SO question: URLEncode()ing file names.

Hörensägen.txt 

gets turned into

H%c3%b6rens%c3%a4gen.txt

which should be safe to use in any filesystem and is able to map any UTF-8 character.

I find this much preferable to trying to "natively" deal with the host OS's capabilities, which is guaranteed to be complicated and error-prone (in addition to operating system differences, I'm sure the various filesystem formats - FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, extFS versions 1/2/3.... bring their own set of rules to be aware of.)

Answer 2

Not an answer, but... WinXP is UTF-8 based (according to Jeffrey Richter's "CLR via C#" book) and all ASCII WinAPI functions are just wrappers for similar UTF-8 ones.