5 ms·
I’ve been using Japanese on computers on a daily basis since the mid-1990s. Mojibaké used to be a regular headache, but fortunately I rarely encounter it now.
by tkgally 4y ago
I’ve been using Japanese on computers on a daily basis since the mid-1990s. Mojibaké used to be a regular headache, but fortunately I rarely encounter it now.
Most of the mojibaké I do see appears when staff at the Japanese university where I teach send around zipped folders of files with Japanese names. When unzipped, the files often have mojibakéd names. I haven’t yet found a way to repair them. (The contents of the files are fine.)
Almost all of the staff use Windows computers, while I and most of rest of the faculty use Macs.
- lifthrasiir 4y agoZIP famously doesn't specify any character encoding in its file names (a later version of APPNOTE introduced an additional bit to signal that UTF-8 is in use which is to my knowledge not really taken off). Many archivers therefore assumed that they are in the active code page, which meant you can experience mojibake even in Windows and in fact was a major pain when you deal with ZIP files originated from other East Asian countries. Later archivers generally have an option to set or guess the character encoding---if you still have those files, try them.
- throwaway197164 4y agoWinRAR (GUI): "Options -> Name encoding -> Japanese Shift-JIS". 7-zip (CLI only): 7za.exe x -mcp=932 file.zip There are also online tools [1] that handle this. [1] https://ianharmon.github.io/mojibake-fixer/ https://ianharmon.github.io/mojibake-fixer/
- jicksaw 4y agoThe Unarchiver tries to guess the correct encoding. GUI is for Mac only, but the CLI is cross-platform. https://theunarchiver.com/ https://theunarchiver.com/