Ubuntu
file-roller package

Difficulties extracting files due to file name encoding

Asked by Peter Ahlström

When a zip archive was made under e.g. windows (using iso8859-1 encoding) files containg non-English characters in the file name are unextractable using "file roller" under linux (using utf-8 encoding). How to tell file roller that another encoding has been used so that the files can be extracted?

(I did not make the zip file myself so I can not change its content)

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Peter Ahlström
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Theodotos Andreou (theodotos) said : 		#1

What is the encoding of the non-english characters?

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Peter Ahlström (peter-ahlstrom) said : 		#2

As I wrote, I believe that it is ISO-8859-1 in the zip-file (from a windows) and UTF-8 in the Linux computer.

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Alessandro Tagliapietra (tagliapietra.alessandro) said : 		#3

Have you tried without gui using the unzip command?

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Peter Ahlström (peter-ahlstrom) said : 		#4

Thanks! This solved the problem (the files in question need of course some smart renaming after extraction where you avoid to use the strange character(s) putting a * instead)

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Alessandro Tagliapietra (tagliapietra.alessandro) said : 		#5

What? the unzip command?

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Peter Ahlström (peter-ahlstrom) said : 		#6

What I meant was that the file names of the files using exotic (i.e., Swedish in this case) characters are still unreadble after the extraction since their names contain iso8859-1 (e.g.) encoded characters whereas your computer uses utf-8 encoding so what you see after unziping is something like

> ls -tr FoU/2010_12_02b
p 4, Ans?kan planeringsbidrag, Design av e-tj?nster Ans?kan planeringsbidrag.pdf

What you do then is
> mv Ans* "Ansökan planeringsbidrag, Design av e-tjänster Ansökan planeringsbidrag.pdf"

and you have go a file with the right file name in (utf-8) encoding