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I have a zip file where directory and file names ( thousands of files ) are encoded in Windows 1251, according to its creator. I.e. the filenames contain Russian or Cyrillic letters. My Windows XP SP3 doesn't show them properly

ÅÑaÑó«ñd instead of АБВГДЕЖ ( I am just showing first 7 letters of russian alphabet, 2 sequences unrelated ).

Can anything be done on OS level to show them properly or are there scripts either to rename or copy all directories and files?

In fact, I have no problem with keeping files' content as is, as they are actually karaoke files (.kar) and song lyrics in Windows 1251 encoding, but I would like to know why the filenames show up strangely.

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The ZIP format has weak support for non-english characters in filenames. As a result, there are may incompatible implementations. The effect you see isn't at the core OS level, but a problem of the ZIP format support in the Windows Shell (Explorer). Other ZIP programs (such as 7Zip) may support this better.

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  • Are you implying, if I unarchive those files,no way to change filename to unicode to have it seen properly in cyrillic ?
    – MicMit
    Sep 1, 2011 at 23:29
  • I'm implying that it depends on the ZIP program you use.
    – MSalters
    Sep 2, 2011 at 8:02
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Zip creation was out of my control and I use Winrar to unarchive. In my case solution was on system level.

  1. Open Regional and Language Options in Control Panel.
  2. On the Advanced tab, under Language for non-Unicode programs, click the language version of non-Unicode programs that will be used.

I set it to Russian. I doubt that such widespread program as Winrar can be classified as non-Unicode, nevertheless

Winrar after reboot started to show file names properly and files after unarchiving are shown properly in Windows Explorer.

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