Re: x-start-menu-icons doesn't install on a W2K german OS

[Benjamin Riefenstahl <Benjamin dot Riefenstahl at epost dot de>]

Hi Igor,


Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu> writes:
> This is probably an ASCII vs Unicode issue.  Most of Cygwin calls
> the ASCII versions of the Windows API.  I'm not sure Cygwin is even
> Unicode-aware.  Windows uses Unicode internally to encode the
> filenames.

It's probably that some program is writing scripts in the standard GUI
8-bit encoding (so-called "ANSI").  But program parameters are read in
the console encoding (so-called "OEM") and than Windows re-encodes
them as Unicode and from there to "ANSI" to pass to the actual
process.

The actual console encoding can be set on NT based systems (and only
there) through APIs and the command utility CHCP.COM.  Their handling
by Cygwin also depends on the CYGWIN environment variable.


For background just a short reminder of the Windows encoding mess:

Windows has Unicode and 8-bit versions of all APIs that take string
values.  Most of the Unicode versions only work on NT and it's
descendents, on Windows 9x/Me the Unicode APIs are present but most
just return an error.  The 8-bit versions use different encodings for
different locales.  They are called "ANSI", because they were based on
ANSI/ISO standard encodings when they were first introduced.

Windows consoles do not use those "ANSI" encodings, but another set
called "OEM" encodings, these were inherited from DOS.  Both "ANSI"
and "IBM" encodings are identified by their number in IBM's codepage
registry.  Western Windows versions use 1252 for Windows APIs and 850
in the console.

> Theoretically, Windows should do the right translation under the
> covers.  It may be as simple as setting the correct codepage or
> locale before trying to create the path...

You can't change the encoding on Windows 9x/Me (at least not easily
and not on a vanilla system).  On NT you can use CHCP.COM.


benny