Windows XP and Chinese filenames.

[Anders]

Hello,

I’ve been setting up a computer for a Chinese friend. I installed her Windows XP with the East Asian language pack support. She has CDs containing documents and files brought back from China. When I try to read these CDs, the directory and filenames are not displayed using Chinese symbols, instead it just displays garbage. Chinese websites can be viewed fine. Does anyone know what I need to do in order to get the filenames to display correctly? She has a Chinese version of Windows 98 on another computer and the CD directories and filenames display correctly on that machine.

Thanks,

Anders.

[Jonny M]

You probably need the Chinese version of Windows XP rather than the English version with the East Asian language pack.

However, I might be talking crap.

[directhex]

the problem here lies in old tech mixed with new tech.

windows 9x (i.e. msdos) supports a very limited number of different characters, and in order to increase the number, the system can be set to use a different character set, called a codepage, depending on location. the most common one you or i would use is cp850, the latin-1 character set. that means that the letter "a" for example is stored a certain way, and that binary value is decoded the same way.

chinese has a number of differnrt codepages depending on what needs to be used, cp950 being most popular. that means that IT saves using a particular codepage, and loads that same codepage. if you try viewing a folder of files made in cp850 under cp950, it'll be screwed, and vise versa

windows nt 5 does away with codepages usually, as it uses unicode - a moder, supports-everything standard. however, the old files will still be written with the old codepage, and would need converting to unicode in order to function.

try the following:

start->run->cmd; "chcp 950"; D:\ (where D is the letter of the cd drive); dir

if my theory is correct, the files should be listed correctly - or at least, with different garbage. it might not be the 950 codepage, but another one entirely. if you then copy all the files to a local ntfs disk (e.g. copy * c:\badger") then it _SHOULD_ do all the translation for you.

i've run into codepage strife before when trying to read files on my linux box from my windows server without specifying which codepage the windows machine uses.

[directhex]

note that if you do file, load in notepad, it lists "encoding", which relates to the internal format a file uses - ANSI for codepage-based system,s unicode or utf-8 for modern systems.

[Anders]

I think I understand your first post DirectHex. So if she has a Chinese version of Windows XP, installing it won’t solve the problem if the files were burnt on an older system using these codepages?

I do not understand you second post though, could you expand on what I would be doing with notepad a bit more please?

Thanks for the replies.

[Kumagoro]

Using a proper Chinese version of win xp will put everything i.e. menus etc into chinese and file names will be displayed properly.

[directhex]

chinese windows xp should use the correct codepage by default, so everything should appear properly.

though i'm curious to know if i was right. have you done the chcp test?

[Anders]

No, I will probably be going round on Thursday. I will post here to let you know how I get on. In the mean time, if anyone has any more thoughts on the subject I’d be very grateful? I would rather not have to install the Chinese version of XP, if she even has one that is. It’s time consuming and I cannot read Chinese.