Subject: Re: Character Encoding (Was: while loop taking input from file via
iconv )

On 15/08/2021 13:58, Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
>
> On Sun, 15 Aug 2021 12:57:24 +0100
> Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> Now the crunch, when I unzip these on a Linux machine, I see different
>> bastardisations of accented characters. So, for example where the full
>> 7zip archive when extracted shows an e acute correctly in both a console
>> and a file manager listing ...
>> "Chat Botté, Le" [e is correctly acute]
>> ... (if you're wondering, a French children's picture book version of
>> apparently 'Puss In Boots'), while with the WinZip main archive a
>> console listing shows a very odd character sequence instead of the e
>> acute ...
>> "Chat Bott'$'\302\202'', Le"
>> ... and a file manager listing has a graphic character resembling a 2x2
>> matrix, concerning which note that while \302 octal = \xC2 hex, and
>> \202 octal = \x82 hex, only the second of these and not the first
>> appears in the symbol:
>> |00|
>> |82|
>
> You aren't going to get anywhere with using high level tools for this. You
> need to go low level and see the values of the actual bytes in the filenames.
> So for example something like
>
> ls *Chat* | od -A n -t x1
>
> which will show the bytes in hexadecimal.

Thanks again, will look into that.

>> My problem is that I can't find a search term to trap this strange
>> character to correct it, for example the following, and a few similar
>> that I've tried, don't work because they don't find the directory:
>> mv "Chat Bott'$'\302\202'', Le" "Chat Botté, Le"
>> mv Chat\ Bott\'$\'\\302\\202\'\',\ Le "Chat Botté, Le"
>
> What directory ? Your post says that some files have strange names. Do also
> some directories have strange names ? In any case , the commands above do not
> show a directory separator.

As part of my manual investigations of the problem, I changed to the
directory of which the problem directory is a direct sub-directory, to
allow experimentation without having to type tediously extended pathnames.

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