thejoelpatrol
commented
1 year ago I'm not sure macOS supports MacJapanese any more. The closest I can find with $ iconv -l is SHIFT_JISX0213. Forcing that encoding for the whole volume results in this:
AFAICT from Google Translate these appear to be roughly sensible filenames.
We don't want to force this manually globally, but even forcing one encoding that we decide via heuristic or settings/preferences or whatever would be better than assuming everything is MacRoman, as we are doing now in the absence of a command-line flag. We could do something like you mention, getting the system language and choosing the appropriate classic Mac encoding based on that, e.g. setting MacJapanese if you set your language to Japanese, MacHebrew if you are set to Hebrew, or Mac OS Thai, Mac OS Ukrainian, etc. But not all of these contain ASCII in the first 7 bits, so you won't be able to make any sense of MacRoman disks if you are set to Thai or Ukrainian, for example, so that's not great. Actually it seems these charsets do generally include ASCII in the first 7 bits so it might be workable, but a pain if you ever want more than one language plus ASCII.
I wonder if a simple GUI application would be useful here, to drag and drop a disk image on it and you can set the language/encoding there for people who don't want to use the command line.
I don't know what kind of heuristic could detect files with multiple encodings per volume, though. That seems real tough. Would those have been handled correctly by classic Mac OS?
In the interim, if you would like to use a volume that you know has a particular encoding, you can mount it manually. Open it in Disk Utility, and unmount the volume but do not eject the image. Get the disk number, e.g. /dev/disk2s2. Then, run this:
$ /Library/Filesystems/fusefs_hfs.fs/Contents/Resources/mount_fusefs_hfs --encoding=${ENCODING_NAME} ${DISK_NUMBER} ${MOUNTPOINT}
eg:
$ /Library/Filesystems/fusefs_hfs.fs/Contents/Resources/mount_fusefs_hfs --encoding=SHIFT_JISX0213 /dev/disk2s2 /Users/joel/mnt
gingerbeardman
d235j
joevt
Following on from issue #2
Previously (hmm, I'm trying to think when exactly? a long time ago!) I could set my Mac to Japanese and reboot, mount an HFS disc that uses MacJapanese character encoding and see the filenames as intended. Reboot was essential, login was not enough.
Such foreign discs are tricky as they contain filenames in multiple character sets. Files may have been copied from other discs or downloaded from the internet, so could contain many different encodings. Encodings are not stored anywhere: they have to be set manually, calculated using heuristics or some other map, or simply assume it.
I have found that Tcl has good support for Apple encodings, most of them written by Apple themselves back in the mid-1990s when this stuff was still very much current. Though macOS should respect and display the original encoding if the characters are correct and the system language is set correctly.
Another gotcha is that bugs/omissions in Japanese input methods (helper apps that assist typing of complex such script using multiple alphabets) allowed non-displayable characters to be typed in filenames! Example: when renaming a file in Finder, pressing the Delete key on an Extended Keyboard would insert that invisible character rather than deleting anything. This means that filenames can be quite dirty and contain invalid characters, which I guess should be resolved in some way or simply ignored?
If you need more details please ask as I have the info in my notes that I can dig out.
Anecdotes
Sample HFS images
disk images that have a mix of MacRoman and MacJapanese:
This one looks 99% MacRoman, with a minimal file or two with MacJapanese names:
I have hundreds more discs of this type.