SFTP and FTP transfer character set selection option?

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Posts: 2
Joined: 26 Aug 2019

chang.wade@gmail.com

In the Chinese area, most of the file name is saved as in Chinese character set.
After the connection via either SFTP or FTP, the file/folder name is shown but in a garbled name form which can not be accessed from the client site. Most of the other FTP software provides country code encoding filenames selection option but not in the SFTP/FTP section of freefilesync.
Is there any other way to workaround? or provide the function in the nearly future version of Freefilesync?
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Posts: 7052
Joined: 9 Dec 2007

Zenju

Are you able to set up the server to use UTF8? That should fix it.
Posts: 2
Joined: 26 Aug 2019

chang.wade@gmail.com

I do not know what code does freesftpd server used, but when the client is set the transfer character-set to UTF8, cilent side can see the server-side folders but can only access folders with English named while not with Chinese named folder. Where is the problem? When the FTP client sets the transfer character-set to big5, everything is OK.
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Joined: 9 Dec 2007

Zenju

FFS uses the UTF8 encoding for both FTP and SFTP if the server supports it, ANSI otherwise. Non-UTF8 can be considered legacy, so if UTF8 is used consistently there should not be any problems (except for very old servers that don't support UTF8).

I'm not sure if it's worth the time to support non-UTF8 encodings in FFS anymore when all that's needed is to set up the server to use UTF8.

In your case, I don't think the issue is that your server doesn't support UTF8. This is possible for FTP servers, but highly unlikely for your SFTP server. Without having a deeper look at it, I suspect FFS requests file names as UTF8 from the SFTP server, but actually receives them in big5, which is essentially data corruption, and the solution is to re-upload thoses file names properly with UTF8.