Symptoms:

  • Language: C++, Operating System: Windows
  • Target Audience: Programmers
  • Sub Area: Reading ASCII / UTF-8 files from the disk using C++ streams.
  • Trouble: How to handle files whose file names contains non-ASCII characters?? (coz ifstream takes a ASCII file path :-( )

Solution:

  • Use _wfopen_s(), the safe version of _wfopen(), which takes a wide-character file name & gives a FILE pointer i.e; FILE*.
  • Use the obtained FILE* to create a stream, like ifstream in(fp);
  • We used wide-character file name & are reading the file byte-by-byte (actually, its char). DONE !! :-)

BTW, I got help from here ! Hope this saves  time for someone out there…