Thank you for the response. I tried that but it doesn't work... because the actual filename returned by the builtin functions, using the example, is "??????_HostID_2006-01-19_213218.xls". It's not just a STDOUT display issue where the leading UTF8 characters are being displayed as question mark characters. The builtin directory functions actually return the question mark characters.
In the workaround solution suggested by Jan Dubois using Win32:OLE and Scripting.FileSystemObject, I do enable unicode / UTF8 binding which then returns filenames with the UTF8 characters -- which can be passed to Excel which finds and opens the file. But the builtin directory functions return question mark characters in place of the UTF8 characters. And passing filenames with question mark characters to Excel does no good -- even with Win32:OLE UTF8 bindings enabled. At one point, it looks like you could set a perl variable that enabled "wide" Win32 API directory calls in the Perl source. For example, Perl's "win32.c" source has calls to a function "USING_WIDE()" that if it returned true, would have called the wide versions of the Win32 API FindFirstFile, FindNextFile calls -- which should have returned filenames in UTF8 / UTF-16LE format. But according to the following, this USING_WIDE functionality had been turned off for some time in the Perl code and has now been stripped out. http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/2005/20051107.html This seems to guarantee that the Win32 Perl 5.8.+ source calls the ANSI versions of the Win32 API directory functions -- which explains why the builtin directory functions (e.g., readdir) return filenames with question mark characters in place of UTF8 / UTF-16LE characters. Regards, ... Dewey "Konovalov, Vadim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/26/2006 04:25 AM To D D Allen/Fairfax/[EMAIL PROTECTED], libwin32@perl.org cc Subject RE: Win32 API, Directories with Unicode / Wide Filenames, FindFir stFileW, FindNextFileW > I have a Win32 Perl coding challenge to search a directory > (WinXP, NTFS) > with a file specification pattern where the directory may > contain files > with unicode / wide filenames in addition to ANSI filenames. > Through > trial, error, and searches against Perl mailing list > archives, it seems > apparent that Win32 Perl's builtin directory functions do not > support / > return Win32 unicode / wide filenames. More specifically, > the builtin > functions return filenames like "??????_HostID_2006-01-19_213218.xls" > when the filename contains unicode / wide characters (the same as the > DOS "dir" command). The problem is that you can't pass these > filenames > to something like stat or via OLE to ask Excel to open it. you need activate Unicode in OLE binding: use Win32::OLE qw(in CP_UTF8); Win32::OLE->Option(CP=>CP_UTF8);
