-has pointers to full pathnames is going to be inherently unportable. One
-approach is to store filenames on their own, with no directory
-information. The application searches through a number of locally
-defined directories to find the file. To support this, the class {\bf
-wxPathList} makes adding directories and searching for files easy, and
-the global function {\bf wxFileNameFromPath} allows the application to
-strip off the filename from the path if the filename must be stored.
-This has undesirable ramifications for people who have documents of the
-same name in different directories.
-
-As regards the limitations of DOS 8+3 single-case filenames versus
-unrestricted Unix filenames, the best solution is to use DOS filenames
-for your application, and also for document filenames {\it if} the user
-is likely to be switching platforms regularly. Obviously this latter
-choice is up to the application user to decide. Some programs (such as
-YACC and LEX) generate filenames incompatible with DOS; the best
-solution here is to have your Unix makefile rename the generated files
-to something more compatible before transferring the source to DOS.
-Transferring DOS files to Unix is no problem, of course, apart from EOL
-conversion for which there should be a utility available (such as
-dos2unix).
-
-See also the File Functions section of the reference manual for
-descriptions of miscellaneous file handling functions.
+has pointers to full pathnames is going to be inherently unportable.
+
+One approach is to store filenames on their own, with no directory
+information. The application then searches into a list of standard
+paths (platform-specific) through the use of \helpref{wxStandardPaths}{wxstandardpaths}.
+
+Eventually you may want to use also the \helpref{wxPathList}{wxpathlist} class.
+
+Nowadays the limitations of DOS 8+3 filenames doesn't apply anymore.
+Most modern operating systems allow at least 255 characters in the filename;
+the exact maximum length, as well as the characters allowed in the filenames,
+are OS-specific so you should try to avoid extremely long (> 255 chars) filenames
+and/or filenames with non-ANSI characters.
+
+Another thing you need to keep in mind is that all Windows operating systems
+are case-insensitive, while Unix operating systems (Linux, Mac, etc) are
+case-sensitive.
+
+Also, for text files, different OSes use different End Of Lines (EOL).
+Windows uses CR+LF convention, Linux uses LF only, Mac CR only.
+
+The \helpref{wxTextFile}{wxtextfile},\helpref{wxTextInputStream}{wxtextinputstream},
+\helpref{wxTextOutputStream}{wxtextoutputstream} classes help to abstract
+from these differences.
+Of course, there are also 3rd party utilities such as \tt{dos2unix} and \tt{unix2dos}
+which do the EOL conversions.
+
+See also the \helpref{File Functions}{filefunctions} section of the reference
+manual for the description of miscellaneous file handling functions.
projects / wxWidgets.git / blobdiff