Sorry if this is the wrong list for this question. I tried asking it on comp.lang.java, but didn't get very far there.
I've been wanting to expand my horizons a bit by taking one of my programs and rewriting it into a number of other languages. It started life in python, and I've recoded it into perl (http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/equivalence-classes.html). Next on my list is java. After that I'll probably do Haskell and Eiffel/Sather. So the python and perl versions were pretty easy, but I'm finding that the java version has a somewhat solution-resistant problem with non-ASCII filenames. The program just reads filenames from stdin (usually generated with the *ix find command), and then compares those files, dividing them up into equal groups. The problem with the java version, which manifests both with OpenJDK and gcj, is that the filenames being read from disk are 8 bit, and the filenames opened by the OpenJDK JVM or gcj-compiled binary are 8 bit, but as far as the java language is concerned, those filenames are made up of 16 bit characters. That's fine, but going from 8 to 16 bit and back to 8 bit seems to be non-information-preserving in this case, which isn't so fine - I can clearly see the program, in an strace, reading with one sequence of bytes, but then trying to open another-though-related sequence of bytes. To be perfectly clear: It's getting file not found errors. By playing with $LC_ALL, $LC_CTYPE and $LANG, it appears I can get the program to handle files with one encoding, but not another. I've tried a bunch of values in these variables, including ISO-8859-1, C, POSIX, UTF-8, and so on. Is there such a thing as a filename encoding that will map 8 bit filenames to 16 bit characters, but only using the low 8 bits of those 16, and then map back to 8 bit filenames only using those low 8 bits again? Is there some other way of making a Java program on Linux able to read filenames from stdin and later open those filenames? Thanks!
