List directories containing Unicode characters on Windows
directory, php, unicode, windows
Solution
Unfortunately, there are a lot of bugs related to PHP access to a windows filesystem. While Windows does store the filenames as UTF-16, PHP's internals use the much older ANSI api's. So it's best to only do stuff with filenames that are in the ascii range, or switch to a different operating system.
Problem
I am using Windows 2003 to write some PHP code. I use XAMPP Portable (copy to D:). The problem: ``` $path = 'D:\ebooks'; $all_file = scandir($path); foreach ($all_file as $file) { if (is_dir("$path/$file") && $file != '.' && $file != '..') { echo $file . "<br />\n"; } } ``` When I call the script (with browser), I didn't see any directories (within D:\ebooks) containing a Unicode character (I tested with Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, Czech). But if I remove `is_dir("$path/$file")`, the directories display with many strange characters and many `???` characters. How can I solve the problem?