Garbled compressed file names

Background

You must know that I am a multi-language user. I worked in Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), and English, and you must understand that characters in different languages use different encodings in computer systems. Today I encountered a garbled compressed file name problem. My friend sent me a zipped file that contains Chinese (Simplified) characters in the file names. That's where the problem lies.

How does the problem look like

This is the zipped file that my friend sent to me.

Looks fine, right? Let's double-click it, and you will see this:

What is the file name??? Lab0 Vivado���ܺ�ģ���װ? Let's move in, and you will see this:

I asked my friend and the name displayed on her screen was like this:

I understand that there must be something wrong with my Windows display - Every Chinese (Simplified) character is garbled in the file name.

How I solved the problem

After getting to know that it is my problem, it's time to find a way to solve it.

I found that the problem is caused by the different encodings.

The country or region of my friend's computer is China while mine is United States.

Our computer system uses different encodings while they are not compatible.

First way (not recommended)

Just change your country or region to China and every Chinese (Simplified) character should be displayed correctly.

Or you can click the Administrative language settings in the related settings section and change system locate to China (1 in the next screenshot).

Someone also mentioned that checking the Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support checkbox (2 in the screenshot above) and restart your PC can also help but it didn't work for me.

Second way

At some time, maybe we don't want to change the country or region setting in our system, then we can use a third-party software to help us instead of using Windows File Explorer.

Here I recommend WinRAR, the world’s most popular compression tool. You may have it installed on your computer already.

Use WinRAR to open the zip file, you will see this:

We knew that the source encoding is Simplified Chinese, so click Options, in the Name encoding (or click the shortcut key Ctrl + E) section, select 936 (ANSI/OEM - Simplified Chinese GBK) -

-and you will find the Chinese (Simplified) characters are rendered normally. After extracting the zip file in WinRAR, the file names are also correct.

Generalize the problem

We have solved the Chinese (Simplified) problem, and for other languages, the problem can be solved accordingly.

First, you need to get to know the country or region setting on the computer which is used to compress the zip file.

If you use the First way, just change your country or region to match the source computer. If you don't know, you can just ask your friend who sent the zipped file to you. For the second way you can select encoding in WinRAR according to the country or region setting of the source computer or try every encoding in WinRAR until the file names are displayed correctly.

Note

The encoding you should choose depends on the country or region setting of the source computer, instead of the actual language of the file name.

I will give some examples down below:

Country or region	Encoding you should choose
United States	65001 (UTF-8)
Taiwan	950 (ANSI/OEM - Traditional Chinese Big5)
China	936 (ANSI/OEM - Simplified Chinese GBK)

For example, if my computer's country or region is United States and I send a zip file to my friend, then my friend should select 65001 (UTF-8) to view the file names correctly although my file names contain Chinese (Traditional) character, instead of selecting 950 (ANSI/OEM - Traditional Chinese Big5). If you selected the wrong encoding, you will see the garbled file names.

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Author: Morgan Willow Chen

Last updated 09/08/2024