My father has a tonne of Spanish music, and much of it has strange
characters (non-ascii). He uses ‘windows’ (http://opensuse.org) XP pro
and I am not sure if it uses UTF-8 by default or not.
In anycase, I am trying to better understand UTF-8, character sets (et
al) because I am trying to back up all of his music using rsync to a
FreeNAS box. The file names get mangled, and I have run out of ideas.
I’ve tried a bunch of things that I won’t attempt to list right now. But
nothing has worked. The files, instead of returning like “this is a
song.mp3” come back as “this is a s<#033>ng.mp3” if the letter o in
‘song’ where a special character (non-ascii).
SO…
the other day I’m working on a bunch of his files, and the filenames
are mangled. I don’t know what charset (character set) the files names
are encoded (?) in. One of the files names includes a ñ which I added
deliberately in opensuse to “test” it to see if it would render find in
Konsole or not.
Firstly XP does not use UTF-8 by default; if it is a Spanish version of
XP it probably uses a particular encoding which is not directly
compatible with most English language encodings or even Latin-1.
That would explain the filename problem.
If you can identify the encoding and extract the text into a text file,
OpenOffice may be able to convert it to UTF-8.
The only way to deal with the filenames is to change them all to ASCII
which would lose any Spanish characters in them. (You can re-encode them
in UTF-8 once you have transferred the files.)
> if it is a Spanish version of XP It is a common en_US version of Win XP> If you can identify the encodingThis is what I am trying to get help on. How can I detect the encoding
of the filenames?> The only way to deal with the filenames is to change them all to ASCIIHow does one accomplish this? And what would the letter become?
Underscores, or hashes with digits (eg. #233), or question marks?> You can re-encode them in UTF-8 once you have transferred the files.)After ASCII-ing all the filenames, converting them to UTF-8 i think will
not benefit me, would it?
