How to open file in PHP that has unicode characters in its name?

Question

For example I have a filename like this - проба.xml and I am unable to open it from PHP script.

If I setup php script to be in utf-8 than all the text in script is utf-8 thus when I pass this to file_get_contents:

$fname = "проба.xml";
file_get_contents($fname);

I get error that file does not exist. The reason for this is that in Windows (XP) all file names with non-latin characters are unicode (UTF-16). OK so I tried this:

$fname = "проба.xml";
$res = mb_convert_encoding($fname,'UTF-8','UTF-16');
file_get_contents($res);

But the error persists since file_get_contents can not accept unicode strings...

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

UPDATE (July 13 '17)

Although the docs do not seem to mention it, PHP 7.0 and above finally supports Unicode filenames on Windows out of the box. PHP's Filesystem APIs accept and return filenames according to default_charset, which is UTF-8 by default.

Refer to bug fix here: https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/3d3f11ede4cc7c83d64cc5edaae7c29ce9c6986f

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UPDATE (Jan 29 '15)

If you have access to the PHP extensions directory, you can try installing php-wfio.dll at https://github.com/kenjiuno/php-wfio, and refer to files via the wfio:// protocol.

file_get_contents("wfio://你好.xml");

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Original Answer

PHP on Windows uses the Legacy "ANSI APIs" exclusively for local file access, which means PHP uses the System Locale instead of Unicode.

To access files whose filenames contain Unicode, you must convert the filename to the specified encoding for the current System Locale. If the filename contains characters that are not representable in the specified encoding, you're out of luck (Update: See section above for a solution). scandir will return gibberish for these files and passing the string back in fopen and equivalents will fail.

To find the right encoding to use, you can get the system locale by calling <?=setlocale(LC_TYPE,0)?>, and looking up the Code Page Identifier (the number after the .) at the MSDN Article https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd317756(VS.85).aspx.

For example, if the function returns Chinese (Traditional)_HKG.950, this means that the 950 codepage is in use and the filename should be converted to the big-5 encoding. In that case, your code will have to be as follows, if your file is saved in UTF-8 (preferrably without BOM):

$fname = iconv('UTF-8','big-5',"你好.xml");
file_get_contents($fname);

or as follows if you directly save the file as Big-5:

$fname = "你好.xml";
file_get_contents($fname);