AEGP_AddCompToRenderQueue doesn't accept unicode paths

[qdin0]

Hi,

I'm using the AEGP_AddCompToRenderQueue API to add a composition to the render queue.

Here's its signature:

SPAPI A_Err (*AEGP_AddCompToRenderQueue)(
                                        AEGP_CompH comp, /* >> */
                                        const A_char* pathZ);

A problem occurs when my paths contain unicode characters. I'm holding everything as wstrings, but then I convert to utf8

before passing them into the API, since it calls for A_char. Unfortunately, it seems like it doesn't like utf8; for example,

passing the filename string

testš.mp4

causes the render queue to save a file as

testš.mp4

How to solve this?

I'm working on Windows.

Thanks in advance.

[Dave_LaRonde]

Change your file path folder names to common letters & numbers.  Same thing for file names.

[qdin0]

I totally would, but our plugin could be running on the machine of a customer whose name

(and therefore home directory contains unicode characters, like e.g. c:\users\šomename), and so any path their AE instance has permissions to write to already contains the problematic characters.

I've played around with the idea of converting to the old school DOS-mode directory names, but this has to work on Mac as well eventually, and so I'm not confident that'll work in the long run.

[qdin0]

So, I'll share what I did.

On Windows, the path to the temporary folder (where the file to render will end up) might contain unicode characters, as mentioned above. I decided to go ahead with DOS "8.3 aliases." The catch is that these only work for files/folders that already exist; since I'm referring to a file that I'm about to render, the file doesn't exist yet. But the directory does. So I convert the directory with the win32 PathGetShortName API. On Mac, the temp directory is not a problem.

For the filename itself, I just create a new filename substituting unicode characters (i.e. !isascii( )) with their integer representation, so "helloç" becomes "hello231".

Concatenate the two above, and you have a fully ascii, cross-platform solution to the problem.

Only caveat is that some systems disable 8.3 aliases, so in this case the Windows solution won't work in every case.

Hope this helps someone...