The espeak-ng path should be UTF-8 encoded for Unicode paths.

[rhdunn]

The path passed to espeak/espeak-ng in the initialization function should be UTF-8 encoded. This relates to the Unicode path part of #10607.

Specifically, espeak and espeak-ng use the Microsoft CRT stat implementation in the GetFileLength function (used to check if the path exists and is a directory). The documentation for stat [1] states:

The _stat function obtains information about the file or directory specified by path and stores it in the structure pointed to by buffer. _stat automatically handles multibyte-character string arguments as appropriate, recognizing multibyte-character sequences according to the multibyte code page currently in use.

In the initialization of the library version of espeak and espeak-ng, it is using setlocale with the following LC_CTYPE values -- "C.UTF-8", "UTF-8", "en_US.UTF-8", and "". As such, the stat call will be expecting the path string to be a UTF-8 string; if it is not, then the initialization call will fail.

This logic has not changed between espeak and espeak-ng.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/stat-functions?view=vs-2019

[paulber19]

It seems that this problem is still not solved although NVDA regularly integrates new versions of ESpeak NG.
It is still not possible to select the synthesizer if the NVDA installation path contains accented characters.It seems that this problem is still not solved although NVDA regularly integrates new versions of ESpeak NG.
It is still not possible to select the synthesizer if the NVDA installation path contains accented characters.