Support for Windows unicode paths

["Thomas Harning Jr." <harningt@...>]

One problem I've recently run into was accessing Windows unicode paths is impossible from Lua with its standard interface.  I blame not Lua for its use of the standard C apis, but instead Windows for bad fallbacks (not to mention Outlook Express dies if you have a unicode username).... in any case it still needs to be dealt with.

Has anybody come up with solutions?  The only reasonably solution I can think of is to have 'replacement' APIs at boundaries that send/receive certain text from the OS...

Ex:
  os.getenv()
  io.open()
  io.popen()
  os.execute
  .... even the require libraries would need something to deal with paths it's using

The replacement format would be:

 Lua -> WIN  : (some charset, ex UTF-8) => Wide
 WIN -> Lua  : wide => (some charset, ex UTF-8)

... any other ideas?

-- 
Thomas Harning Jr.