Re: musicxml2ly unsupported unicode range

[Aaron Hill]

On 2020-03-06 9:13 am, Torsten Hämmerle wrote:
> Jean ABOU SAMRA wrote
> >    You likely have a special character in the name of your file.
> >    Windows handles this poorly and LilyPond (actually Python,
> >    behind the scenes) can't do much for this. Try removing
> >    special characters from the file name, it should solve
> >    your problem.
>
> I can confirm this (Win 10).
> And what's even worse: while one can avoid special characters in 
> filenames,
> it is not possible to specify languages containing special characters, 
> as in
>
> I just won't work in Windows, neither on the command line nor via
> Frescobaldi:
>
> <http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/file/t3887/fresco-language-xml.png>

While I am not an apologist for any operating system, I fear folks are 
being far too quick to blame Windows here.

Like any current operating system concerned with internationalization, 
Windows and NTFS handles and supports filenames with Unicode characters 
just fine.  There are only a few characters and filenames that are 
reserved [1] by the file system and operating system, but those are 
ASCII-only.

The attached image shows a file with Greek and Cyrillic characters in 
its name.  In all shells, I used tab-completion to enter the filename in 
the prompt.  The only visual quirks are due to some shells not using the 
right codepage, but that is an application-level issue.  For instance, 
CMD has its roots in an older era, so I would not expect it to handle 
UTF-8 content.  On the other hand, I was surprised by Powershell's 
default encoding.

As my experience with Python is very limited, I will make no attempt to 
comment on whether the this thread's original issue is due to the 
musicxml2ly script, the Frescobaldi program, or the Python 
language/runtime itself.  But rest assured, a properly-written program 
can most definitely interface with the Windows API and file system to 
allow for Unicode characters in file paths.

----

[1]: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename#Comparison_of_filename_limitations


-- Aaron Hill

windows-unicode.png
Description: PNG image