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Oooh, here's some more fun. On my Mac, here's how an e with an accute accent shows up in the XML for the file name:

Ste%CC%81phane%20Grappelli

Here's the same thing from the XML on a PC:

St%C3%A9phane%20Grappelli

What's going on here? Is this some bastard disagreement about Unicode character interpretation or what?

Oh dear. You've copped for a normalisation problem. Basically, there are two ways in Unicode of representing e-acute: you can either use the e-acute character, which is what your PC has done (this is called NFC, for "normal form, composed"), or you can use an e followed by a combining acute accent, which is what your Mac has done (this is called NFD, for "normal form, decomposed"). Both are then represented in UTF-8, and then URL-escaped.

The Macintosh filesystem canonicalises filenames to NFD, whereas Windows canonicalises to NFC. Both have their advantages: NFD can represent more characters (x-acute, say, which doesn't exist as a single character), but NFC makes UI code a lot simpler as it doesn't have to compose the characters at render time.

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maybe Samba is smart enough to translate between these things.

Looks that way, yes.

Peter