Re: Getting an ifstream for a file with unicode chars in the file name

I am working with an open-source library which reads mp3 tags
(id3lib).

It seems to handle unicode OK within the tags ok ... but to
instantiate the central class from a file, it first creates an
ifstream this way:

ID3_Err dami::openReadableFile(string fileName, fstream& file)
{
 file.open(fileName.c_str(), ios::in | ios::binary | NOCREATE);

Which fails if the file name contains unicode characters.
std::fstream.open() doesn't support wchar_t characters at all, nor
UTF-8.

I can change the source code and rebuild it, I think I am stuck with
that much, but unless I am going to massively redesign the project, I
need to end up with an fstream. Internally throughout the rest of the
library it is going to expect an fstream as a class member.

But for the life of me I can't find a way to create an fstream from a
file with unicode characters in the file name.

I found a few suggestions through Google, like this one:

std::ifstream stm(_wfopen(pwsz,L"rb"));

Where you use _wfopen() to open the file with wchar_t characters in
the file name, then pass the FILE * returned by that to the ifstream
constructor. But at least in MSVC++ 6.0, that just doesn't work. The
constructor for ifstream won't accept a FILE *.

Does anybody know a way to do this?