The UTF string did not get saved correctly in the bug report. It was a japanese string.

For anyone stumbling upon this bug, i wrote a workaround building a wrapper for filesystem functions. This workaround will will not fix the issue completely but will work with latin compatible characters when using UTF8 as the string encoding. People using other characters (japanese, chinese, hebrew ...) will still have problems.


CODE:


/**
 * Wrapper for PHP filesystem functions
 */
class Fsw {

    /**
     * Returns the filename for use with filesystem functions
     */
    static function setName ($file) {
        if (DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR=="\\") {
            $file=utf8_decode($file);
        }
        return $file;
    }

    /**
     * Encondes the filename returned by filesystem functions
     */
    static function getName ($file) {
        if (DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR=="\\") {
            $file=utf8_encode($file);
        }
        return $file;
    }


    static function file_exists ($filename) {
        return file_exists(self::setName($filename));
    }

    static function fopen ($filename,$mode) {
        return fopen(self::setName($filename),$mode);
    }

    static function opendir ($dirname) {
        return opendir(self::setName($dirname));
    }

    static function readdir ($dir_handle) {
        $file=readdir($dir_handle);
        if ($file) {
            // check if file is found before converting it's
            // name or we will convert bool(false) to string
            $file=self::getName($file);
        }
        return $file;
    }

// just create any other filesystem function you might use in your code here

}

Can't be fixed in 5.2 neither in 5.3. It will work smoothly in 6.x (unicode support).