How to decompress a ZIP file with specified file/directory name character encoding?

I got ZIP file(s), which contains files, which filenames are in some encoding. Let's say I know encoding of those filenames, but I still dont know how to properly decompress them.

Here is example file, it contains one file "【SSK字幕组】The Vampire Diaries 吸血鬼日记S06E12.ass"

I know used encoding is GB18030 (Chinese)

Question is - how to unpack that file in FreeBSD using unzip or other CLI utility to get proper encoded filename? I tried everything what I could, but result was never good. Please help.

I tried on OSX:

MBP1:test 2ge$ bsdtar xf gb18030.zip
MBP1:test 2ge$ ls
%A1%BESSK%D7%D6Ļ%D7顿The Vampire Diaries %CE%FCѪ%B9%ED%C8ռ%C7S06E12/ gb18030.zip
MBP1:test 2ge$ cd %A1%BESSK%D7%D6Ļ%D7顿The\ Vampire\ Diaries\ %CE%FCѪ%B9%ED%C8ռ%C7S06E12/
MBP1:%A1%BESSK%D7%D6Ļ%D7顿The Vampire Diaries %CE%FCѪ%B9%ED%C8ռ%C7S06E12 2ge$ ls
%A1%BESSK%D7%D6Ļ%D7顿The Vampire Diaries %CE%FCѪ%B9%ED%C8ռ%C7S06E12.ass*
MBP1:%A1%BESSK%D7%D6Ļ%D7顿The Vampire Diaries %CE%FCѪ%B9%ED%C8ռ%C7S06E12 2ge$ find . | iconv -f gb18030 -t utf-8
.
./%A1%BESSK%D7%D6L抬%D7椤縏he Vampire Diaries %CE%FC血%B9%ED%C8占%C7S06E12.ass
MBP1:%A1%BESSK%D7%D6Ļ%D7顿The Vampire Diaries %CE%FCѪ%B9%ED%C8ռ%C7S06E12 2ge$ convmv -r -f gb18030 -t utf-8 --notest .
Skipping, already UTF-8: ./%A1%BESSK%D7%D6Ļ%D7顿The Vampire Diaries %CE%FCѪ%B9%ED%C8ռ%C7S06E12.ass
Ready!

I tried similar with unzip, but I get similar problem.

Thanks, now trying on FREE BSD, where I am connecting using SSH from OSX (Terminal):

# locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_ALL=C

The first thing, I would like to is to proper show Chinese names. I changed

setenv LC_ALL zh_CN.GB18030
setenv LANG zh_CN.GB18030

Then I downloaded file and try to "ls" to see proper characters, but not luck. So I think I have to solve first Chinese locale to verify when I get proper result, actually I can compare it. Can you also help me please with this?

13 Answers

Here's what I do on Ubuntu 16.04 to unzip a zip in any encoding, as long as I know what that encoding is. The same method should work on FreeBSD because it only relies on widely available unzip tool.

1. I double-check the exact name of the encoding, as to not misspell it:

2. I simply run

   $ unzip -O <encoding> <filename> -d <target_dir>

   or

   $ unzip -I <encoding> <filename> -d <target_dir>

   choosing between -O or -I according to instructions here:

   $ unzip -h
   UnZip 6.00 of 20 April 2009, by Debian. Original by Info-ZIP. ... -O CHARSET specify a character encoding for DOS, Windows and OS/2 archives -I CHARSET specify a character encoding for UNIX and other archives ...

   which means that I simply try -O and it should work, because not a lot of people would create a .zip file in Unix...

---

So, for your specific example:

1. The exact encoding name is GB18030.

2. I use the -O flag and:

   $ unzip -O GB18030 gb18030.zip -d target_dir
   Archive: gb18030.zip creating: target_dir/【SSK字幕组】The Vampire Diaries 吸血鬼日记S06E12/ inflating: target_dir/【SSK字幕组】The Vampire Diaries 吸血鬼日记S06E12/【SSK字幕组】The Vampire Diaries 吸血鬼日记S06E12.ass

   ... it works.

10

Method 1 : use unar utility

sudo apt-get install unar
unar -e gb18030 gb18030.zip

Method 2 : Use a python script to unzip the file (reference )

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# unzip-gbk.py
import os
import sys
import zipfile
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--encoding", help="encoding for filename, default gbk")
parser.add_argument("-l", help="list filenames in zipfile, do not unzip", action="store_true")
parser.add_argument("file", help="process file.zip")
args = parser.parse_args()
print "Processing File " + args.file
file=zipfile.ZipFile(args.file,"r");
if args.encoding: print "Encoding " + args.encoding
for name in file.namelist(): if args.encoding: utf8name=name.decode(args.encoding) else: utf8name=name.decode('gbk') pathname = os.path.dirname(utf8name) if args.l: print "Filename " + utf8name else: print "Extracting " + utf8name if not os.path.exists(pathname) and pathname!= "": os.makedirs(pathname) data = file.read(name) if not os.path.exists(utf8name): fo = open(utf8name, "w") fo.write(data) fo.close
file.close()

The example gb18030.zip will extract the following file

【SSK字幕组】The Vampire Diaries 吸血鬼日记S06E12
【SSK字幕组】The Vampire Diaries 吸血鬼日记S06E12/【SSK字幕组】The Vampire Diaries 吸血鬼日记S06E12.ass

2

On most POSIX filesystems the filename is just a series of bytes and it's up to userspace to make any sense of it. You can use this to your advantage.

1. First, extract the archive using bsdtar, since the unzip tool seems to mangle the file names, while bsdtar will extract them raw. (I'm testing this on Linux. I guess FreeBSD just calls it tar.)

   $ bsdtar xf gb18030.zip

2. Verify that tools like iconv can successfully decode the names:

   $ find . | iconv -f gb18030 -t utf-8

   (Note that this only affects the find output, not files themselves.)

3. Finally use convmv to convert the file names to UTF-8:

   $ convmv -r -f gb18030 -t utf-8 --notest .

   (Note: I had to install Encode::HanExtra from CPAN for the GB18030 support, and manually add use Encode::HanExtra; to /usr/bin/convmv even though it's supposed to

4. In case convmv is unavailable, script it:

   $ find . -depth | while read -r old; do old=./$old; head=${old%/*}; tail=${old##*/}; new=$head/$(echo "$tail" | iconv -f gb18030 -t utf-8); [ "$old" = "$new" ] || mv "$old" "$new";
   done

   (At least on Linux, this has an advantage in that iconv is almost always available, and it always supports gb18030.)

4

On OS X, you can use a GUI application called The Unarchiver. It can be installed using Mac App Store or Homebrew Cask:

brew cask install the-unarchiver

When you open a ZIP file with it, the application lets you choose the appropriate encoding using preview of a filename from the archive.

7z supports charset ID with a switch -scs, e.g.:

7z x -scs903 some.zip

where 903 is 中文簡體 charset. A longer list of charset IDs can be found here.

2

Use 7z to extract the file

7z x yourfile.zip

After that, convert the encoding of those filenames yourself:

convmv --notest -f from_encoding -t utf-8 -r your_extracted_folder/

This works for me.. from_encoding in my case is tis-620 (which is a Thai encoding), you need to find an appropriate encoding of your language. A popular one usually solves the problem but if the file name is still unreadable then try changing from_encoding to other things such as windows-1252 or shift-jis (Japanese) or whatever, you can list the available encoding using command:

convmv --list
iconv --list

This is very simple "how to solve" method for me.

I just used 7zip and it managed to pick the right encoding – something that standard zip couldn't do.

However, I used it on Windows, with the GUI tool. Maybe the command line 7z will work for you, too.

3

Shell sh oneline script with iconv:

for f in /path/*.txt; do mv $f `echo $f | iconv -f 866 -t UTF-8`; done

Script above is loop doing iterate through whilecard and move files from one codepage (866) to another (utf8).

Same and with reading while-card from pipe line:

echo * | for f in `read f&&echo $f`; do mv $f `echo $f | iconv -f 866 -t UTF-8`; done

There is no output except access rights denied if any. Also warning is possible when filename is the same in both codepage, because it appears as move file to same path.

1

Wrote a patch for unzip fixing this issue:

The same patch for p7zip:

unar never turn me down:

brew install unar
unar -e GBK *.zip

Since unzip is mangling the encoding of non-ascii file, the simplest workaround, as mentioned in other answers, is to switch to 7z and specifically to 7za which worked as expected on mac:

7za x '*.zip'

👆Note the use of quotes — this prevents expansion by the shell (bash, zsh, etc) and delegates the expansion to 7za.

Also, depends on your use case, but with 7za there was no need to explicitly specify the encoding — unlike unzip, it managed to infer the correct encoding.

python3 script to unpack cp866 archive:

#!/usr/bin/python3
from zipfile import ZipFile
import os
import sys
def extract(filepath, directory = '', listonly = False): with ZipFile(filepath, 'r') as zip: for name in zip.namelist(): data = zip.read(name) unicode_name = name.encode('cp437').decode('cp866') type = "DIR" if zip.getinfo(name).is_dir() else "FILE" print(type, unicode_name) if listonly: continue if zip.getinfo(name).is_dir(): continue unicode_name = directory + '/' + unicode_name dirpath = os.path.dirname(unicode_name) if not os.path.exists(dirpath): os.makedirs(dirpath) f = open(unicode_name, 'wb') f.write(data) return 0
kwargs = {}
i = 1
while i < len(sys.argv): arg = sys.argv[i] if arg[0] != '-': kwargs['filepath'] = arg elif arg == '-l': kwargs['listonly'] = True elif arg == '-h': kwargs['usage'] = True elif arg == '-d': i += 1 kwargs['directory'] = sys.argv[i] i += 1
argc = len(kwargs)
if argc > 3: print("Error: Max. 3 args expected,", argc, "are given.") exit(1)
print("Arguments given:", kwargs)
if "usage" in kwargs: print("""
Usage: %s [OPTIONS] FILEPATH")
Options: -l - list files only -d - output directory
""" % sys.argv[0]) exit(1)
ret = extract(**kwargs)
exit(ret)

Example:

❯ ./unzip Budget_2020.zip -d dir
Arguments given: {'filepath': 'Budget_2020.zip', 'directory': 'dir'}
FILE Исполнение бюджета 2020 г/Исполнение бюджета 2020 года.pdf
DIR Исполнение бюджета 2020 г/Приложения к Заключению/
FILE Исполнение бюджета 2020 г/Приложения к Заключению/01_Прил_к Заключению Доходы.xls
FILE Исполнение бюджета 2020 г/Приложения к Заключению/02_Прил_к Заключению ГП.xlsx
FILE Исполнение бюджета 2020 г/Приложения к Заключению/03_Прил_к Заключению ГП ГРБС.xlsx
FILE Исполнение бюджета 2020 г/Приложения к Заключению/04_Прил_к Заключению ГП ИНД.pdf

With 7zip, You can specify the encoding to use with the -mcp switch.

To extract simplified Chinese zip files with GB18030 encoding (Code page 54936)

7z e -mcp=54946 zipname.zip

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