8.3 filenames on classpath under Windows XP

Question

Hi,
I have an application where the classpath may include paths with unicode characters. Since there is no obvious way to pass such paths to the JVM at startup, I have tried to convert the paths to the short (8.3) format prior to passing them to the JVM (as this format seems to be free of unicode characters). However, any paths supplied to the JVM in this way seem to be ignored e.g. having AClass inside jar C:\classp~1\My.jar means the jar won't be found. I'm running under WinXP.
The system property java.class.path correctly contains the short name and File objects created with such a path correctly resolve. Can anyone tell me which classloader to look at to see where the items on the classpath are being examined and how to actually debug this? I'm thinking the only way around this is to implement my own classloader :(
Thanks in advance,
James.

Answer 1

OK - have investigated this a little further; it turns out that the URLClassLoader first resolves the full path and then converts it to a URL; the URL conversion code changes the unicode entries into hex characters which the file system does not recognise. To summarise the code, the conversion that takes place is effectively:
File pathEntry = new File(pathString);
File canonicalFile = pathEntry.getCanonicalFile(); // path contains unicode characters
URL pathEntryURL = sun.net.www.ParseUtil.fileToEncodedURL(canonicalFile); // URL now contains hex characters; e.g. c:\classp~1\My.jar resolves as c:\classpath%ce%af%ce%b1\My.jarClearly the use of the ParseUtil class is at fault here as it does not encode the path in a way that is fully compatible with the OS filesystem.
Personally I think this is a bug - can anyone else offer me an opinion on this??