Thursday, December 7, 2017

windows - When copying a file/folder, strange characters are added to the file or folder name


My operating system is Windows 10.


When I copy a file or folder to the same location they are in, Windows automatically adds the word "copy" to the end of the file name,
which is great. But there is a strange phenomenon that at the beginning of the file name are added two unvisible characters.


I made a paste copy of these characters to a binary editor and it turned out that these were the code of each of them: U+200F


And the name of a character is: RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK


And its binary representation is: e2 80 8f


What to do? How can we get rid of this strange phenomenon?


Edit, operating system details:


Version: Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17134.885]


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\CodePage:


    AllowDeprecatedCP    REG_DWORD    0x42414421
ACP REG_SZ 1255
OEMCP REG_SZ 862
MACCP REG_SZ 10005

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion:


ReleaseId    REG_SZ    1803

Answer



I wouldn't have believed it, but after downloading your Zip file, I did
find that your file does have this right-to-left override
as first character in its name.
I went even to hex-editing the directory entry to verify that this is
indeed the case.


The good news is that it is entirely harmless, no text being hidden by this
character, so your computer is not infected by a malware that uses this
esoteric method to hide anything in the file name.


My private opinion, not based on any source since there doesn't seem to be any,
is that you found a weird Windows artifact whose sole purpose is to assure the
right-to-left display of the Hebrew word for "copy", עותק.


My conclusion is that this is a not-too-clever localization of an English feature
to Windows in Hebrew. The source of this character may
have come from the translator who probably mechanically translated strings
used in Windows without understanding their context or use.
He may in this way have introduced this Unicode character into the string,
maybe even without noticing that it was there.
Since then Hebrew Windows keeps on blindly adding this character.


I must say that I'm impressed that you have even managed to analyze this problem,
probably the world's first Hebrew-reader to have done so.
(I did find one person who also discovered the same for the Persian
language.)


I don't think there is any remedy to this problem. This has become a Windows
"feature". The most you may do is file through the Feedback Hub a complaint
with Microsoft.


Realistically speaking, you may either ignore the problem, or avoid copying
files with the same names, or use some renaming utility to take the character out
of the name.


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