#169 Bug with german Umlauts such as: ä ö ü, also in capital, from ext4 linux filesystem; also problems with directory names such as "last_backup_ 02.07.2017-15:56:15/"

[shevy]

Hello there.

I am not sure if you wish to fix this, as it may seem like a minor problem affecting only ... 0.0001% of the user base. :D

But I will report it anyway, perhaps there may be a simple fix.

This is actually two reports in one, sorry - sourceforge issue trackers are a bit annoying to use.

So, first bug:

Consider a directory called "last_backup_ 02.07.2017-15:56:15/", without the "" quotes.

After mounting the external USB device as F: capital letter, I could navigate the top root directory, and the above directory was one entry there - so far so good. Then I tried to "cd" into this directory by double-clicking, but ext2fsd showed a popup - something along the lines of an illegal or invalid directory name. I renamed this on my linux system to "last_backup" intead and then it worked.

I think that ext2fs chokes on the ":" character there.

Now of course, most people will not use ':' tokens there - the only reason I do so is because the above is actually automatically generated when I do a backup on my linux system; and I like to have the timestamp directly within the name of that directory, since then I know when the backup there happened, without having to look at another file or so.

Anyway, I guess this one is easy to reproduce - you can probably test-create some directories on a linux system (hopefully you have one). I am not sure if windows allows such names for directories, but my point is that the above should work or cd-related actions within ext2fs at the least. For example, the above directory is the only "invalid" one - I have no time stamps in files or directories for WITHIN that directory, so if the cd-action would have worked, I could perhaps have copied it from ext2fd itself... anyway, it may be that this can not be fixed so fair enough; just wanted to mention it regardless. Let's move to the next bug report.

2) This one is a big more tricky.

Some of my files contain german umlauts and are in non-unicode files (sorry!); some ISO encoding ... variant 1 or 15, not sure. Anyway.

Files such as: "PRÜFUNGSFRAGEN.md" which is german for "exam questions".
But also other umlauts in file names ä ö ü and Ä Ü Ö.

The unfortunate thing is that these are not copied at all. Windows reports an error so I assume that this error happens upon copy-action, so it may be that windows has the problem here, not ext2fsd. And I don't know if ext2fsd can fix this or if it is worth to add this. In these cases, by the way, it would be fine for me if ext2fsd would "suggest" to windows that these are german umlaut files and I could use alternatives, such as in this table:

ä .... ae
ö ... oe
ü ... ue

Ä ... Ae
Ö ... Oe
Ü ... Ue

For me it would be better if the file names get renamed automatically rather than windows refusing to copy. I assume that this is mostly a windows issue, and not related to ext2fs, so I should fix it on my windows system first. But just in case, I also reported this on ext2fsd so that at the least you are aware of the situation. Right now I have the problem that windows even refuses to copy a whole directory for some reason... possibly because it contains to many "invalid" umlauts... I will investigate this further and experiment a little here; perhaps ntfs file system has no problems, which would bei interesting. I may add to this bug report lateron if I have more time - thanks for reading!