Unicode support for "Recursive file list.vi"

[SergeS]

I am using Labview 2015 under Windows 10/11. Have find out that "Recursive file list.vi" does not support Unicode characters in folder's and file's names, it returns question marks instead of such characters. Are there any workaround for this problem? Do newer versions of LabVIEW support Unicode?  If yes, so from what version?

[paul_a_cardinale]

LabVIEW does not support Unicode file paths at all.

[Andrey_Dmitriev]

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@SergeS wrote:

I am using Labview 2015 under Windows 10/11. Have find out that "Recursive file list.vi" does not support Unicode characters in folder's and file's names, it returns question marks instead of such characters. Are there any workaround for this problem? Do newer versions of LabVIEW support Unicode?  If yes, so from what version?

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Well, impossible is nothing. Some limited support for Unicode is present (you have to enable it by placing UseUnicode=True in the LabVIEW.ini file).Then you have two possible workarounds. One is to call an OS command like 'chcp 65001 && dir /s /b /a:-d >mylist.txt', then load and parse the output file. The other is to use WinAPI FindFirstFile()/FindNextFile(). The second way is slightly more elegant, but it requires additional knowledge. Unfortunately, nothing is available 'out of the box'.

[rolfk]

Another option might be to try to use OpenG ZIP library 5.0. It also contains a complete palette of file functions that support Unicode file names and paths.

But beware! That part is a supportive library for the ZIP library. It's functionality is still experimental and tailored to the use of that library. Its functionality is not completely tested and might behave strange or bad in various places.

And it doesn't solve the problem of displaying those paths in a LabVIEW front panel. It simply allows to enumerate files and do file operations on paths using an unicode representation of the paths. Optically, those paths are represented as LabVIEW binary strings, meaning that they look gibberish when displayed on a front panel without extra measures such as using the unofficial Unicode support feature in the LabVIEW Ini file and according libraries to convert between the LabVIEW ASCII representation and Unicode format.

[maxnoder1995]

This seems to be the directory you are looking for:
https://www.vipm.io/package/dataflow_g_lib_g_unicode/

Open the example "Unicode Tree File Browser Example.vi".