zip files with greek characters not matched

Nik_GR_Mac,

do you know if those .zip archives were created on OS X? One possibility is that they were created under an OS that uses a different character encoding for Greek letters. If the contents of the .zip archive are not of a sensitive nature, and you would be willing and able to make the .zip archive available on a publicly accessible site, I could try downloading it to see if I can identify which character set its filenames and files use.

lack of font embedding

Nik_GR_Mac,

OK, once the .zip archive has been uploaded to a publicly available site, please let me know what its URL is, so that I can download it to identify which Greek character set it uses.

Why have you started a second discussion of this problem?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6125132?answerId=25572453022#25572453022

Did you try the file encoding repair app?

Can't you produce a simple test zip file which is a reasonable size with a short name? The one at your url is huge and will not unzip on my machine.

I'm sure it is nothing wrong with your mac. OS X requires Unicode file names and Windows and other platforms can easily produce non-compatible encodings.

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

lack of font embedding

Font embedding is totally irrelevant to filenames.

Nik_GR_Mac,

when you look at the contents of the 100 MB .zip archive on Windows 7, what is the Greek name of the top folder within the archive? I don’t see a correspondence to any of the well-known Greek character sets for the filenames in the archive. If they display correctly on Windows 7, then knowing what the top folder’s Greek name is could provide a hint as to how the filenames were encoded within the .zip archive. The Latin letters appear correctly, so it doesn’t seem to be a case of purposely obscuring the filenames.

For the test .zip archive which you’d created on Windows 7, which Windows app did you use to create the archive?

The file name of the Word doc, which is ßú®†úÆÊ£ú§ò

may correspond to ΠΕΡΙΕΧΟΜΕΝΑ

Does that ring any encoding bells for you?

And does ÑêÇÄëàÑë perhaps correspond to "εργασιεσ"?

Tom,

that one-to-one correspondence doesn’t follow Greek alphabetic order in byte value progression, so perhaps there might have been a double encoding involved. I’ll experiment a bit, and perhaps I’ll have a εὕρηκα moment. 😉

It looks like cp 737 read as if it were macroman

PS Nobody normally uses the old cp 737 (Greek DOS) or MacRoman encodings for anything any more. That some zip utilities still do indicates how out of date they are.

Tom,

the filenames are indeed in code page 737 (your first example is “ΕΡΓΑΣΙΕΣ/περιεχόμενα.doc”), but because the .zip archive does not contain extended language encoding data fields to advise unarchivers of the filenames being in code page 737, unarchivers are (properly) treating the filenames as if they were in code page 437. The problem lies with the archiving app which created this particular archive.

Nik_GR_Mac,

if you extract this archive onto a NTFS file system, do the file names appear properly there? (That is, do they appear properly within a Windows program, rather than within a DOS command window?) If so, then you might be able to use a Windows .zip archiver to create a replacement archive from the files on the NTFS filesystem, which (ideally) would record the filenames correctly in the new archive, which in turn would allow their proper extraction from the replacement archive onto your MacBook Pro.