Evert Pot has a new post to his blog about working with files in your applications, more specifically in dealing with filesystem encodings other than some of the defaults.

Many PHP applications save files to a local filesystem. Most of the times for the bulk of readers here you'll likely only ever store files using US-ASCII encoding, either because your filenames are simply based on database fields (as you should try in most cases), or simply because most of your users never have a need for non-english characters. When you do though, it's important to know how operating systems cope with these characters. Unsurprising, all of them do this differently.

He talks about encoding issues in three major operating system types - Windows, OS X and Linux - with some code snippets included to illustrate how each handles the different encodings.