When PHP fails due to unicode path issue, terminate application immediately

[GoogleCodeExporter]

When application is started from a path that contains unicode characters, then you will see a "No input file specified." message in the browser window. Example location on XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\Unicode ąć\My Documents\Downloads\

Where "Unicode ąć" is the user's account name on Windows XP.

The solution would be to check the content of the initial web page during application startup, if it equals to "No input file specified" then application should be terminated immediately and a message should be displayed to user, something like:

Application has detected that it has been placed in a location on your hard drive that contains unicode special characters (%DISPLAY_PATH_HERE%). Due to some constraints this is not allowed. Application will terminate immediately.

This kind of problem occurs when your Windows account name contains non-standard characters. The solution is to put application directory in a location that contains only standard ASCII characters, put it to "C:" or to "C:\Program Files". Application must have permission to write files in that location.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by [email protected] on 1 Feb 2014 at 1:54

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Fixed in revision d56e9a3.

See the attached image to see how does the error message displayed to user look like.

On Win XP after clicking that dialog, some other error appears ("could not write to memory at location.."), but fixing that isn't that important I think, as this is a special case when application exits and user already knows there is something wrong going on. The second error message doesn't occur on Win7.

Attachments:

• unicode-error-dialog.png