On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 11:52 PM, Michael Snoyman <michael@snoyman.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I think this is a well-known issue: it seems that there is no
character decoding performed on the values returned from the functions
in System.Directory (getDirectoryContents specifically). I could
manually do something like (utf8Decode . S8.pack), but that presumes
that the character encoding on the system in question is UTF8. So two
questions:

* Is there a package out there that handles all the gory details for
me automatically, and simply returns a properly decoded String (or
Text)?
* If not, is there a standard way to determine the character encoding
used by the filesystem, short of hard-coding in character encodings
used by the major ones?

I started to write a thoughtful reply, but I found that the answers here sum up everything I was going to say:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2089/what-charset-encoding-is-used-for-filenames-and-paths-on-linux

This same issue comes up from time to time for darcs and, if I recall correctly, the solution has been to treat unix file paths as arbitrary bytes whenever possible and to escape non-ascii compatible bytes when they occur.  Otherwise it can be hard to encode them in textual patch descriptions or xml (where an encoding is required and I believe utf8 is a standard default).

I wish you luck.  It's not as easy problem, at least on unix.  I've heard that windows has a much easier time here as MS has provided a standard for it.