Japanese culture in C# application in English OS

Question

I have an application in C# using .net 3.5. Using this application I save an file and zip it using vjlib library and while opening the file I unzip it. However when I try to give file name as Japanese when saving it in English OS machine the file while opening it the application it not able to understand Japanese character. It due to some Windows Language pack etc.

Answer 1

This problem is most likely induced by the application that created the .zip file. File names are encoded in 8 bit characters inside the file. The ZIP specification says that the name should be encoded either in code page 437 or in utf-8. Code page 437 is the original IBM PC character set, an encoding that doesn't support any Japanese characters. It is not unusual for an app to just use its own 8-bit encoding, not untypically determined by the default system code page.

The library you use is the .NET runtime support library for JScript. Not sure it support specifying a different encoding, it is hard to find docs for it these days since it has been deprecated for so long. Consider, say, dotnetzip . Its ZipFile class has an AlternateEncoding property you can initialize from Encoding.GetEncoding(). You still need to find out what encoding was used, knowing where the file came from is important help to make the right guess. One common code page for Japanese is 932.