@lassoan “/” has ASCII code 47 which is unchanged by utf8 encoding. That’s the beauty of utf8 with respect to altering/finding file paths and extensions etc. Anything within ANSI 128 is encoded as is. This was actually a request of american experts, so that pre-existing documents, written in plain english, would contain the exact same number of bytes and require no change in format. Also no need for a byte order mark, BOM, with utf8.
If VTK were not already mostly utf8 safe, I think you would have encountered many issues from Linux/Mac users long ago.
@ben.boeckel I looked through some of the string splitting and so far it appears to be a non-issue.
Text display issues (lengths etc) only need to be handled/converted close to where they are displayed/sorted. Otherwise they can just flow through VTK untouched.