# File/path names with special characters on Windows systems
**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070
**Category:** ParaView Support
**Created:** [December 16, 2020, 10:07am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070 "2020-12-16T10:07:03Z")
**Posts on this page:** 13
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@cobo](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/cobo)
#### Post date: [December 16, 2020, 10:07am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/1 "2020-12-16T10:07:03Z")
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…
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [December 16, 2020, 10:07am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/2 "2020-12-16T10:07:46Z")
Which version of ParaView ?
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### Author:  [@cobo](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/cobo)
#### Post date: [December 16, 2020, 10:40am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/3 "2020-12-16T10:40:30Z")
5.8.0
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [December 16, 2020, 10:42am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/4 "2020-12-16T10:42:15Z")
Could you try with 5.9-RC2 ?
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### Author:  [@cobo](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/cobo)
#### Post date: [December 16, 2020, 10:44am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/5 "2020-12-16T10:44:14Z")
Download is on it’s way…
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### Author:  [@cobo](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/cobo)
#### Post date: [December 16, 2020, 10:49am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/6 "2020-12-16T10:49:23Z")
Bad luck: The problem is still there… 😒
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [December 16, 2020, 10:55am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/7 "2020-12-16T10:55:02Z")
@todoooo and @cory.quammen may have more insight
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### Author:  [@cobo](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/cobo)
#### Post date: [December 16, 2020, 1:10pm UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/8 "2020-12-16T13:10:54Z")
Another observation: With version 5.7.0 I can load the file!
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### Author:  [@todoooo](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/todoooo)
#### Post date: [December 17, 2020, 6:32am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/9 "2020-12-17T06:32:44Z")
That’s too vague. Please post an example usage.
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### Author:  [@cobo](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/cobo)
#### Post date: [December 17, 2020, 8:28am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/10 "2020-12-17T08:28:38Z")
Very simple: I generated a file like this one, with an umlaut and an accent aigu in the name:
[demoA\_blöcké.vtu](https://discourse.paraview.org/uploads/short-url/ljHywlZPwlDrDAbrcdssmQmpVRQ.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!?
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### Author:  [@simmler](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/simmler)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2021, 8:34am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/11 "2021-09-17T08:34:05Z")
I can confirm the behavior of the Windows variant (5.9.1). Paths with special characters cannot be processed.
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### Author:  [@todoooo](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/todoooo)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2021, 9:18am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/12 "2021-09-17T09:18:18Z")
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.
> [@ParaView 5.9.1-RC2 available for download](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/paraview-5-9-1-rc2-available-for-download/7100/10):
>
> For a patch version, we try to avoid including sweeping changes to many parts of the code. They’ll be in 5.10, though.
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### Author:  [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2021, 9:20am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/file-path-names-with-special-characters-on-windows-systems/6070/13 "2021-09-17T09:20:27Z")
5.10 Should be out in october