Linux won't show foreign characters in filenames.

yooy · 11-14-2013, 09:12 AM

Foregein characters are still not correctly displayed. Symbol "?" is displayed instead in file manager when files have characters specific for latin languages, chinese, russian etc.

Is this possible to fix?

On ubuntu 13.10

DavidMcCann · 11-14-2013, 12:28 PM

Are these files that have been created in Windows? If you have a question mark in a diamond, that mean that Linux cannot understand the encoding. If your fonts simply didn't have the necessary character, you'd get a little box.

You can convert a text with the iconv tool, but I suspect a script for converting file names would be rather complex: I'd have to do it manually myself.

yooy · 11-14-2013, 03:26 PM

Quote:

Are these files that have been created in Windows?

yes

Quote:

If you have a question mark in a diamond, that mean that Linux cannot understand the encoding.

that's the case.

DavidMcCann · 11-15-2013, 11:01 AM

Then that's the problem. Windows uses a different way of representing Unicode (UTF16) to everyone else (UTF8), so the special characters are represented by pairs of bytes that are meaningless in Linux.

As I said, there is a utility for converting text, but writing a bash script that will get file names, feed them to iconv, and replace them with its output is beyond me. Perhaps you could ask "how to batch-process file names with iconv" in the programming section of the board.