Unicode in VFAT file system

From: Ken Krugler (ken@transpac.com)
Date: Thu Jul 20 2000 - 14:00:59 EDT


Hi Unicoders,

Recently I've had the dubious pleasure of delving into the details of
the VFAT file system. For long file names, I thought it used UCS-2,
but in looking at the data with a disk editor, it appears to be
byte-swapping (little endian). I thought that UCS-2 was by definition
big endian, thus I've got the following questions:

1. Could it be using UTF-16LE? I tried creating an entry with a
surrogate pair, but the name was displayed with two black boxes on a
Windows 2000-based computer, so I assumed that surrogates were not
supported.

2. Is little-endian UCS-2 a valid encoding that I just don't know about?

3. And finally, why are file names case-insensitive for characters in
the U-0000 to U-00FF range, but not for any other characters? OK,
maybe I can guess at the answer to that one...

Thanks,

-- Ken
Ken Krugler
TransPac Software, Inc.
<http://www.transpac.com>
+1 530-470-9200



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