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I have a folder full of sub folders and files which are named using Hebrew encoding (Windows XP - Windows-1255). I now use Windows 7 and I want to convert all file names into UTF (Native Windows 7 which supports Hebrew characters).

Is there a tool to do so automatically?

Pay attention, I'm not after converting the internals of the file, only its file name.

Thanks!

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What file system are they stored on? As far as I know, both FAT32 (LFN) and NTFS enforce Unicode, so having filenames stored in another encoding just should not happen. – grawity Aug 25 '11 at 7:39
NTFS. ON XP they don't enforce the use the default Encoding set on the control panel. – Drazick Aug 26 '11 at 6:48
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Windows stores file names on disk in UCS2 (two-byte) encoding. This applies to FAT, FAT32 NTFS and exFAT.

It's unlike Linux/FreeBSD where filesystems have one-byte encoding, and it can be Windows-1255, UTF-8, ISO-8859-* etc.

UCS2 (two-byte encoding) is converted to ANSI (one-byte encoding) by Windows for some old non-Unicode software which is using old system calls like FindFirstFileA(), FindNextFileA() instead of new system calls FindFirstFileW(), FindNextFileW().

So all you need on Windows is to change "language for non-Unicode programs" setting in Control Panel / Reginal and Language Settings. On-disk data is not affected.

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