Thank you everyone, I now have a better understanding of how Windows and Cygwin work (being rather a Linux guy, I was not really aware of all of this).
However, there is still a question that is puzzling me. I now understand _why_ things happen that way, but I am still wondering whether this is really what we _want_. I mean, keeping the double quotes around an UTF-8 argument just because it is not run from Cygwin's bash sounds like a bug for me, doesn't it? (yet I definitely understand the reasons that explain this behaviour). Since I cannot run my program from bash, I have to resort to manually trimming the quotes, which I would have liked to avoid. I'd like to share a message that the maintainer of sshfs-win has posted on Github [1], which is a follow-up to our discussions (he did not know whether he was able to post in the mailing list without subscribing first). (besides, I unfortunately don't have much time currently to investigate on this issue (for instance, I have not yet succeeded in doing the same experiments with the very latest version of Cygwin), so having his feedback is very valuable). Here is what he says: > It seems to me that the list is missing the important point > about the double quote characters that should NOT be there > regardless of how the é and ô characters are being interpreted. > (As evidence of this: the Cygwin command line parser was able > to break the command line into arguments correctly, but chose > to retain the double quotes.) > > The choice of GetCommandLineA was for illustration purposes; > had I used GetCommandLineW I would not be able to printf > using %ls under CMD.EXE, because of code page issues. However > here is a modified version of the test program that uses > GetCommandLineW. > > #include <stdio.h> > > wchar_t *GetCommandLineW(void); > > int main(int argc, char *argv[]) > { > wchar_t *s = GetCommandLineW(); > > for (wchar_t *p = s; *p; p++) > printf("%04x %c%s", > *p, > 32 <= *p && *p < 127 ? *p : '.', > (p - s) % 8 + 1 != 8 ? " " : "\n"); > printf("\n"); > > for (int i = 0; argc > i; i++) > printf("%d=%s\n", i, argv[i]); > > return 0; > } > > I compiled this program under Cygwin to produce cyg.exe and ran > it under Cygwin and CMD.EXE. > > Cygwin run: > > billziss@xps:~/Projects/t$ locale > LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" > LC_ALL= > billziss@xps:~/Projects/t$ ./cyg.exe "foo bar" "Domain\Jérôme" > 0022 " 0043 C 003a : 005c \ 0055 U 0073 s 0065 e 0072 r > 0073 s 005c \ 0062 b 0069 i 006c l 006c l 007a z 0069 i > 0073 s 0073 s 005c \ 0050 P 0072 r 006f o 006a j 0065 e > 0063 c 0074 t 0073 s 005c \ 0074 t 005c \ 0063 c 0079 y > 0067 g 002e . 0065 e 0078 x 0065 e 0022 " > 0=./cyg > 1=foo bar > 2=Domain\Jérôme > > > > > > CMD.EXE run: > > C:\Users\billziss\Projects\t>\Windows\System32\chcp.com > Active code page: 437 > > C:\Users\billziss\Projects\t>cyg.exe "foo bar" "Domain\Jérôme" > 0063 c 0079 y 0067 g 002e . 0065 e 0078 x 0065 e 0020 > 0020 0022 " 0066 f 006f o 006f o 0020 0062 b 0061 a > 0072 r 0022 " 0020 0022 " 0044 D 006f o 006d m 0061 a > 0069 i 006e n 005c \ 004a J 00e9 . 0072 r 00f4 . 006d m > 0065 e 0022 " > 0=cyg > 1=foo bar > 2="Domain\Jérôme" [1] https://github.com/billziss-gh/sshfs-win/pull/208 Thank you very much Jérôme Le mar. 13 oct. 2020 à 18:30, Kaz Kylheku (Cygwin) <743-406-3...@kylheku.com> a écrit : > > On 2020-10-06 14:36, Jérôme Froissart wrote: > > Here is an example C file > > $ cat example.c > > #include <stdio.h> > > > > const char *GetCommandLineA(void); > > > > int main(int argc, char *argv[]) > > { > > const char *s = GetCommandLineA(); > > printf("C=%s\n", s); > > > > for (int i = 0; argc > i; i++) > > printf("%d=%s\n", i, argv[i]); > > > > return 0; > > } > > Your program's comparison seems to be based on the > hypothesis that Cygwin parses the GetCommandLineA() command line. > > But this hypothesis is almost certainly wrong. > > > Now, let's start a Windows shell (cmd.exe) > > Note that I had to copy cygwin1.dll from my Cygwin installation > > directory, otherwise binary.exe would not start. > > I do not know whether there is a `locale` equivalent in Windows > > command prompt, so I merely ran my program. > > C:\Users\Public>binary.exe "foo bar" "Jérôme" > > C=binary.exe "foo bar" "J□r□me" > > 0=binary > > 1=foo bar > > 2="Jérôme" > > The "A" command line from GetCommandLineA has "tofu" > characters: é and ô were not decoded properly. > > The é and ô characters we see in the Cygwin-parsed > arguments coming into main could not have been recovered > from these "tofu" replacement characters. > > What is actually being parsed must be the WCHAR command line > corresponding to what comes from GetCommandLineW(). > > It's necessary to show that one to get a more complete understanding. > -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple