Does this suppose that all OS paths can be represented as a string of wchar's? Does it suppose that the whole range that wchar_t can cover is usable in file names? Would that have to be added to the wchar_t definition? What if I want to use a 32-bit Unicode codepoint for a filename on Windows?
wchar_t is supposed to be able to hold all the characters that are supported by the operating system, so any narrow character multi-byte sequence should be representable as a wide character one, but... Not all wide character sequences can be represented as a narrow character one (depending upon the encoding used), and if the underlying OS uses narrow character strings as path names (unix), and the wide character sequence can not be converted, then the file can not exist, so we get an error either which way. As for using UTF-32 strings on Windows, are surrogates allowed as path name characters? If "yes" then I guess it's supported (but you may have to do the UTF-32 to UTF-16 conversion yourself), this is an area that needs more thought. John.