Kecia asked:

We understand there is a known issue with winzip where it doesn’t work if certain Unicode characters are in the extract path (since the path to the user’s temp directory contains the user name, this issue occurs when a user name contains the offending Unicode characters).

  • Has anyone shipped with this issue (vs. opting to use winrar or some other app)?
  • If you did ship with it, how bad was the issue out in the field (how many people see it, call PSS, etc).
  • Does anyone know a way to work around it?

Now I have talked about the general issue with ZIP previously in Zipping up Unicode file names. The specific issue Kecia brings up if you have a user name outside the default system code page is arguably much more worrisome.

As Mihai commented, there is room for future expansion in the ZIP format, which is good. Although it seems like no one wants to bite the bullet and have the backcompat problems (more on this another day).

I do have some good news, which was reported by Rostislav in response to Kecia's post:

 "compressed folders" in XP have this limitation too. Due to the feedback, we've fixed a part of the problem in Vista - now you can extract to a multilingual path. Still you can't have files with multilingual names in the archive.
-Ros

Ok, so we are wimpy too about the backcompat thing. But note that this particular feature works around the problem that Kecia mentioned in relation to the off-CP_ACP user name (the change will work around any off-CP_ACP characters in the path, in fact!

Progress, I say. And I'll talk more about why/how in an upcoming post....

 

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