Sftp support and UTF8 support

Demi-god · 05-04-2003, 01:03 AM

Although sftp has nothing to do with the actual ftp protocol, having support for it in Flashfxp would be really cool. CuteFTP Pro 3.0 already has that, but CuteFTP sucks. I know having sftp added would require a lot of time and effort but sftp is clearly superior in a firewall-restricted environment. Besides, many sysadmins do not even bother to install an ftp server.

Also, the to-do list mentions support for multiple languages. I don't exactly know what this means but what I would like to see is support for dir/file names in UTF8 so that I can transfer to and from directories that have names in some other than latin-1 charset. There is even an RFC that specifies how to implement UTF8 support for FTP clients and servers. Currently Flashfxp displays those names as ?????. Why does Flashfxp convert the dir names internally to latin1 anyway? Why not use them as they are and only convert when communicating with an ftp server?

bigstar · 05-04-2003, 01:57 AM

Due to design- sftp is nearly impossible to implement unless we rewrite flashfxp.

I don't have much experience with UTF8, Unicode, or multibyte character sets. FlashFXP uses ANSI strings all internal list handling, the list controls also use ANSI strings. I don't know why ???? is displayed.

I am not aware of this RFC, It would be very useful for future reference.

Demi-god · 05-04-2003, 12:55 PM

Internationalization of the File Transfer Protocol:
http://war.jgaa.com/ftp/rfc/rfc2640.txt

FlashFXP displays ???? because Windows uses Unicode(UTF-16, maybe UTF8?) for file/directory names and since FlashFXP uses ANSI strings internally, a conversion has to be made. Because my locality is set to Finnish, the program attempts to convert these names to latin-1 (as opposed to shift-JIS which would be appropriate for Japanese characters) and because these characters do not belong to the latin-1 character set the converted string is instead filled with question marks.