Problem synchronizing between Win XP and Win Me (3.4.1550u)

rolandf · Post by **rolandf** » Mon May 12, 2008 11:09 am

I have currently many files that have a 'o slash' (U+00F8 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE) or some other special characters in their filenames. Now, when I try to synchronize, for example, a folder that has a "Testø" file with a Win Me computer, the file is copied, but there it gets the filename "Testo". This in itself is not such a problem, but when I run the next synchronization, Synchronize It! doesn't recognize that "Testø" and "Testo" refers to the same file and wants to delete the latter again.

Is there any workaround for this problem? If not, it would be great if you could introduce a function that allows the user to specify that certain characters in filenames should be treated as identical.

Thanks for looking into this,

Roland

Post by **grigsoft** » Mon May 12, 2008 3:18 pm

Can you try to manually create folder with such name in ME? If you can do this, problem is in Synchronize It!, Unicode version should help in this case. If you can not, then, as you suggest, some conversion rule should be added. I will think this over.

rolandf · Post by **rolandf** » Mon May 12, 2008 10:41 pm

Yes, I can manually create folders and files with names containing "ø" and "æ" in both Win Me and Win XP without any problem. The problem for Synchronize It!, however, seems to be that Win XP uses Unicode for folder and file names, but Win Me (and 9x) does not.

I always use the Unicode versions of both Synchronize It! and Compare It!

It would be a great help if you could fix that. Thanks!

Post by **grigsoft** » Tue May 13, 2008 4:15 am

I assume you are running Unicode version on XP, and creating folders over network on ME?

rolandf · Post by **rolandf** » Tue May 13, 2008 4:54 am

Yes, I'm running the Unicode version of Synchronize It! on the XP side and folders/files are then created or updated on the ME side.

Post by **grigsoft** » Tue May 13, 2008 6:50 am

Have you tried using non-unicode version for XP-ME sync? Does it work differently?
Also, your ME version is in English or localized?

rolandf · Post by **rolandf** » Tue May 13, 2008 12:39 pm

No, I haven't tried the non-Unicode version for this yet.
Both my XP and ME are in English.

Post by **grigsoft** » Tue May 13, 2008 1:03 pm

OK, Thank you for report! I'm playing now with ME in VirtualPC, have found already some other error, will try to do something with this.

Post by **grigsoft** » Wed May 14, 2008 11:37 am

In my tests if you copy files from XP to ME using explorer you have same problem. You see the same?
Can you try this version - http://www.grigsoft.com/wndsyncbu.zip

rolandf · Post by **rolandf** » Thu May 15, 2008 12:49 am

Yes, that's true. When I copy such files from XP to ME, 'ø' will be replaced with 'o'. I wasn't aware of that.
Strangely enough it's no problem to create filenames with 'ø' on ME itself, but when you look at the file over the network from XP the 'ø' is replaced by '_' (underscore). And when you try to create such a filename over the network (i.e. from an XP machine creating the file on ME) the 'ø' gets automatically replaced by 'o'.
This is certainly an inconsistency how Windows converts such filenames between different encodings.

Anyway: I tested your new version and it's much better! Although it still replaces any 'ø' with 'o' (and en-dash or em-dash with hyphen, left quote (U+2018) with Grave accent (x60), and right quote (U+2019) with apostrophe (x27)) it now treats these characters as identical and no longer tries to delete such files in a subsequent run. That's great. Thank you very much!

There is still a problem that it can't synchronize files with left/right double quotes or Greek characters in their filenames, for example, but Windows explorer (from XP to ME) can't handle that either, and I very rarely need this, so we probably have to forget about that.

Again, thanks very much for the improvement!