> in practice, virtually every system is using UTF-8 for things like pathnames and the like. I mean, *nix filenames are a pretty weird case where you have thes

> in practice, virtually every system is using UTF-8 for things like pathnames and the like. I mean, *nix filenames are a pretty weird case where you have these requirements of 0x2F always being a path separator and 0x00 always meaning "end of path". In truth, we can't guarantee anything about filename encoding other than those two things. So, for example, you might be dealing with UTF-8 or EUC-JP. In practice (as a sibling comment pointed out) all you usually need to do is scan for 0x2F and stop at 0x00, so this works out OK, but if you ever need to do anything else, welcome to guessing the encoding based on locales, environment variables, or other (OOB) configurations. > However, the mechanism to indicate that this is the case is frequently enough unreliable that it's often less bug-prone to assume the system is UTF-8 anyways. My argument, which I guess looking at it I've not articulated at all in this thread, is that UTF-8's ASCII compatibility and *nix filename compatibility have allowed us to be slack in fixing this. It oughta be possible to configure an encoding when creating a filesystem, just like creating a database. There's nothing inherently buggy about configuring an encoding, we just haven't gotten our systems programming act together, and UTF-8's amenability to the existing situation is probably at fault here. > since every character is usable in UTF-8 I guess you mean like, vs. EUC-JP or something? Sure but UTF-16 is fine here too. > One of the features of UTF-8 is that virtually any text that isn't UTF-8 will fail to parse as UTF-8. IDK the "brittleness" of an encoding feels hard to quantify. Besides, I think if you're doing the (always required) validation step, this goes for any input. Look at things like weirdo MySQL/Oracle/MSSQL database encodings for example. --- I should say I see where you're coming from. But I think we'd be in just as good a place if we specified a filename/text encoding at filesystem creation (OOB configuration) and quit relying on magic 0x2F/0x00 bytes. I don't know why this makes people tear their hair out as some kind of impossible problem to solve.