alt Hacker News> I'm not sure what spec [the prohibition on non-ASCII names is] referring to, but this is normal and expected for files in non-English systems.
The description of import directories[1,2] in the PE/COFF spec explicitly (if somewhat glibly) restricts imported DLLs to being referenced using ASCII only:
> Name RVA - The address of an ASCII string that contains the name of the DLL.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for... (current, unversioned)
[2] https://github.com/tpn/pdfs/blob/master/Microsoft%20Portable... §6.4.1 (version 6.0, 1999)
That is, for lack of a better term, a "Microsoft-ism"; in MS documentation, "ASCII" consistently means "single-byte or MBCS" and is interpreted relative to the current codepage, as opposed to "Unicode" which means "UCS-2 or UTF-16". You can also see examples of "Unicode" in the docs you link to.