Providing custom to_json from_json for std::filesystem::path to circumvent utf-16 issue on Windows?

[Gazoo101]

Hey y'all,

I'd love some feedback on an issue I'm facing, along with an idea for how to solve it.

I rely on this absolutely amazingly useful library (nlohmann::json) to communicate between a C++ back-end and a JavaScript front-end.

As is often pointed out in various support tickets, nlohmann::json only supports Utf-8, and (to the best of my knowledge) Windows uses Utf-16 inside of std::filesystem::path, and my attempts to change this, e.g. via compiler option /execution-charset:utf-8 have yielded no change.

It seems to me that an easy and generally encapsulated solution is provide my own custom to_json and from_json converters and manually convert the std::string inside of std::filesystem::path to be Utf-8 and back again. As far as I know, I think I'd have to manually set JSON_HAS_FILESYSTEM to 0.

Anyone see an issue with this approach or something else I'd have to do to fix it?

Cheers
Gazoo

[gregmarr]

I can't speak for nlohmann but I imagine that there would be support for a PR to make it work properly on Windows if it could be done reasonably and to cover all cases.