099, Mac : file in parents folder with accented characters

This problem is only on 099 Mac Os version. Still present on the build 13460. Note that if a toe file is inside a folder with accented letters (this happened often in french) or that any of the parents folders is named with something contains an accented characters, the file won’t load. This problem could also happen when the OS user name have accented.
I am sure it has to do with the limitation of DAT to manage non-ascii characters.

At least, if there is nothing that can be done, I would suggest to add a note to the Wiki, in the MacOS page.
derivative.ca/wiki099/index.php?title=MacOS
Maybe in the “Limitations and Known Issues”?

You are correct that it’s related to a “limitation of DAT to manage non-ascii characters”

Unicode characters are currently not supported in any DAT, including the File in DAT.

This is not a macOS specific limitation, This limitation the same on Windows as it is on macOS version of TouchDesigner. As such it doesn’t warrant a mention on the macOS wiki page.

I hope Unicode support is added to DATs at some point. Unicode is at least supported in the Text SOP and Text TOP.

More info here:
derivative.ca/wiki099/index … le=Unicode
‘Note: Unicode is not supported yet in DATs.’

‘yet’ hopefully means it’s on the roadmap… ASCII is such an ancient character encoding at this point :smiley:

Work on unicode support is very far along. It won’t make it into the 30000 series builds but I expect will in the next release cycle.

Just to mention that if I put a toe file in a folder in Windows, and the path name contains an accent, there is no problem at all. It seems to be a specific limitation on OSX.

Ah, yes I can confirm this discrepancy. From what I understand --this is due to Windows still supporting conversion for legacy character encodings that extend ASCII to include accented Roman characters, the most common being Windows-1252, whereas macOS does not support any legacy character encoding. modern macOS filesystems and APIs only support Unicode.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
(I tested many of the characters here, and find they appear as expected in DATs with TouchDesigner 099 build 14620 on Windows, but not macOS)

So this means the Windows version of Touchdesigner supports conversion from a few Unicode characters in the filesystem that match a legacy character encoding, (only those for some western european languages like French, German, but not Russian / cyrilllics, Chinese, Japanese, etc)

So while I doubt this can or should be resolved before Unicode support is fully implemented (which, according to Malcolm, will be sooner than I thought! :slight_smile: ) It seems this is a macOS specific limitation as you say.