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Can anyone elucidate whether the new UTF-8 codepage allows working with filenames that aren’t valid UTF-16 (i.e. containing mismatched surrogate code points)?

In general I think it’s best to stick with the native "W" functions and/or wchar_t on Windows.

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It does not. Invalid UTF-16 (aka unpaired surrogates) are replaced by the Unicode REPLACEMENT_CHARACTER (�) However, in practice such filenames are only produced by malicious software and many large products won't work with them anyway (e.g. Microsoft's own VSCode).

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