Hello everyone!
I have a problem with unzipping zip files that contain files with special characters in their names, it ignores them and do not unzip those files.
Wonder if someone else has noticed this and started an issue in Moodle Tracker. I searched, but only found an issue in Moodle < 1.9, so I created MDL-30436
Moodle is running on LAMP (CentOS 6). Used both 7-zip and windows internal zip to create zip files (in Windows 7).
sounds like this php bug:
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=51929
bit of other info in MDL-24928
Dan:
Indeed, it was MDL-24928. Thank you!
In Moodle 1.9, we could configure Path to ZIP, so that Moodle could use zip instead of PHP/ZIP. Is that still possible?
I have been using zipped files for a few years now and many times students have illegal characters in the names of the files. I never "unzip" a file as such, I double click on the zipped file and drag the enclosed file to a folder where the system unpacks them for me. So far, I have not seen any problems.
What characters give you problems? I can check my system to see what happens here in 1.9 moodle.
the way 1.9 handles zip and the way 2.0 handles zips is quite different - also you are referring to using your local OS to handle the zip/unzip - I presume the original reporter is using the "built-in" PHP/Moodle unzip rather than using the unzip on their local machine and there is a known issue with UTF8 file names when using built in PHP zip handling in Moodle 2.x as referenced above.
Why didn't you write your forum post in Chinese?
Presumably becuase you don't speak/write chinese, and therefore it would be difficult for you. Why should we force the whole world to use the roman alphabet?
heh - I was just going to post a "don't feed the troll" image but Moodle didn't have a smiley that worked easily..... <- that will have to do.....
File names are not just meta-information. In some scenarios they are an important part of the file.
That was one of the reasons why we did the file changes in Moodle 2.0, so the user-visible file name would be stored in the database, in UTF-8, while the files stored in moodledata have filenames that are just [a-f0-9]*.
It sounds like the zip standard includes UTF-8 file-names, but the zip libraries do not always handle that. That is a bug in the zip libraries, that needs to be fixed.
I am absolutely not going to get into a semantics argument on wikipedia about whether the filename is data or metadata.
Suffice it to say that, in Moodle, when teaching, some teachers care a lot that they can call their file Café.ppt, so Moodle has to be able to handle that.
Visvanath:
The purpose of UTF-8 was to allow everyone to use their language characters in filenames (among other things, of course). Moodle already supports UTF-8, which is a great thing.
But I think it's not OK to ask every teacher and every student in my school: "please, dont use special characters in your filenames or directories".
In portuguese, there are words that have different meanings if they lack the accents, and we do use a lot of accents in our words. And we also have the "ç", that is different from the "c", and that could cause different words to be written.
So, the effort taken to give computers the capacity of "knowing" how to deal with almost all characters, in different types, is indeed a good thing.
Don't take me wrong, I do understand your point of view. But it should not be necessary for us to adapt to computers: they have the computational power to be adapted according to our needs - and that's how it should be!
Kind regards.
Hi all,
I do agree with the idea of avoiding special characters in filenames. As a Moodle admin, the policy I gave the course developers was not to use them at all.
My own environment is Windows (though my servers are Linux), and eventhough the OS doesn't have any problem with accented characters or others like "ñ", utilities do tend to have them. For example, I use a Windows version of "tar" and it doesn't handle them (e.g. "á" gets converted into "ß").
Even with M 2.x, the server does get to see the real filename when one uses the File system repository.
