GLibWin32get_command_line

Gets the command line arguments, on Windows, in the GLib filename encoding (ie: UTF-8).

Normally, on Windows, the command line arguments are passed to main() in the system codepage encoding. This prevents passing filenames as arguments if the filenames contain characters that fall outside of this codepage. If such filenames are passed, then substitutions will occur (such as replacing some characters with ‘?’).

GLib’s policy of using UTF-8 as a filename encoding on Windows was designed to localise the pain of dealing with filenames outside of the system codepage to one area: dealing with commandline arguments in main().

As such, most GLib programs should ignore the value of argv passed to their main() function and call g_win32_get_command_line() instead. This will get the “full Unicode” commandline arguments using GetCommandLineW() and convert it to the GLib filename encoding (which is UTF-8 on Windows).

The strings returned by this function are suitable for use with functions such as g_open() and g_file_new_for_commandline_arg() but are not suitable for use with g_option_context_parse(), which assumes that its input will be in the system codepage. The return value is suitable for use with g_option_context_parse_strv(), however, which is a better match anyway because it won’t leak memory.

Unlike argv, the returned value is a normal strv and can (and should) be freed with g_strfreev() when no longer needed.

Available since: 2.40