I don't pretend to fully understand various unicode standard but it seems to me that these problems are deeper than file path library. The equation (decode . encode) /= id seems confusing for me. Can you give me an example when this happen? What can we do when the file name is passed as command line argument to program? We need to convert String to FilePath after all.
Even simple manipulations break in the presence of encoding issues, or even just of unusual paths. What is the extension of "\\.\TAPE0" ? Its not "\TAPE0". BTW this is a valid path on Windows 2000 upwards. If you don't care about corner cases, then you have no worries. It would be nice to have correct handling for all valid paths on each supported OS though.
Yes it isn't. If the library makes proper parsing it will return "no extension". Krasimir