For this upcoming release, we added a fallback path that allows users to work with both UTF-8 and non-UTF-8 filenames. You’ll also find a new environment variable called HDF5_PREFER_WINDOWS_CODE_PAGE that allows users to always treat a filename as non-UTF-8 regardless of what format the filename is meant to be. With this change, users won’t need to work around international characters in filenames and will find a much cleaner fix than our previous efforts in 1.14.4.
Let us know if you have any questions about this change. Look for the new HDF5 2.0.0 release coming out soon!