File/path names with special characters on Windows systems

Just found out that ParaView on a Windows system is not able to deal with folder and file names containing characters like ä, ö, ü, é, à etc.: They are simply “ignored”! On my Linux system this does not seem to be a problem.

Is this a known problem or even a “feature”? And if yes: How do people deal with it? Just make sure these characters never occur? Not always easy if you are living in Europe…

Which version of ParaView ?

5.8.0

Could you try with 5.9-RC2 ?

Download is on it’s way…

Bad luck: The problem is still there… :unamused:

@todoooo and @cory.quammen may have more insight

Another observation: With version 5.7.0 I can load the file!

That’s too vague. Please post an example usage.

Very simple: I generated a file like this one, with an umlaut and an accent aigu in the name:

demoA_blöcké.vtu (314.4 KB)

On my Linux system I can simply go and open it. However, on the Windows 10 system I open the file dialog from the “Open” function, see the file in the dialog window, double click it but nothing happens, or press “Ok”, but the dialog behaves like I had nothing selected: It simply does not react.

As another step I renamed the folder in which the file is located to something like “Umläüt”. In that case I could not even get into that folder with the “Open” dialog: I could see the folder name, but clicking was again like I was clicking on nothing.

All this I could reproduce with Windows 10 and ParaView 5.8.0 and 5.9-RC2, while with version 5.7.0 everything worked just fine: I could open the file and visualize it etc.

Bottom line: To me it looks like the problem is in the “Open file” dialog somehow. My guess is that it might have to do with what I guess is the way how Linux and Windows are dealing with such file or folder names: AFAIK Windows is encoding them with UTF-16, while Linux uses UTF-8. Both should work of course, but it might be that some handling needs to happen somewhere.

Maybe the root cause of the problem is also somewhere coming from the underlying Qt version!?

I can confirm the behavior of the Windows variant (5.9.1). Paths with special characters cannot be processed.

Unfortunately the UTF8 support has not been merged into 5.9.1 because the code changes were deemed too extensive for a patch version upgrade. I don’t know when 5.10 is due for release.

5.10 Should be out in october

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