In the original thread, I found this reply by Beman: -----------------
How exactly do I imbue UTF-8 codecvt in a path? I Googled around and couldn't find anything.
There are two approaches: * If you always want all class path arguments and returned values with a value type of char to be treated as being UTF-8 encoded, and aren't worried about changing a potentially dangerous global, then do this: #include <boost/filesystem/detail/utf8_codecvt_facet.hpp> ... std::locale global_loc = std::locale(); std::locale loc(global_loc, new boost::filesystem::detail::utf8_codecvt_facet); boost::filesystem::path::imbue(loc); ----------------- I do want what is described and would like to use this approach, but we use boost::filesystem all over the place and in our code we never do any sort of "global initialization", so I'm trying to figure out how to get the code snippet executed. I can see two ways to approach this: 1) Add this code snippet to the boost::filesystem::path constructor. But is it too late then? 2) Define a class whose only purpose is to execute this code when it is constructed and arrange to have a static singleton instance of the class defined. In one of our libraries we need to be very careful about static class construction order, so this may be difficult. I haven't dealt with this sort of issue in quite a while and I may be a little rusty. Any suggestions? Are there new goodies in C++ that might help me? Thanks, Rush