[8.01] corrupt descript.ion file

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sgp
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[8.01] corrupt descript.ion file

Post by *sgp »

I did some research to verify compatibility of descript.ion files brtween TOTALCMD and recent versions of Take Command prompt a.k.a. TCC formerly 4NT and 4DOS. The reference TCC version I used is 13.04.63 free a.k.a. TCCLE which can be downloaded from JPSoft's website.

It turns out that TCCLE (and subsequent TCC pay versions 13 and 14) can create descript.ion files in various encodings including UTF-16LE. Unfortunately when TOTALCMD 8.01 encounters a UTF-16LE descript.ion file it does two things: 1) it doesn't show file comments; 2) if you edit (F2) any file comment, the existing descript.ion file gets corrupted with no visual evidence in the filelist, which shows the new comment, but with disastrous results for existing TCCLE comments.

Reproducing this issue:

There are various methods to create a UTF-16LE encoded descript.ion file with TCCLE, the simplest one is to:

Code: Select all

mkdir newFolder
cd newFolder
option //UnicodeOutput=Yes
echo.>commentThisFile
describe commentThisFile /D"some comment"
This should yield a UTF-16LE descript.ion file in newFolder. If it doesn't I can post my sample files.
Tested on WinXP SP3 and Win7 SP1, English x32
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ghisler(Author)
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Post by *ghisler(Author) »

Some questions:
1. How can it be recognized as UTF-16LE? Does it have a byte order marker (BOM)?
2. You write about various encodings, how can they be detected?
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sgp
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Joined: 2005-01-31, 16:04 UTC

Post by *sgp »

ghisler(Author) wrote:Some questions:
1. How can it be recognized as UTF-16LE? Does it have a byte order marker (BOM)?
2. You write about various encodings, how can they be detected?
1. Yes FFFE. I used a TCCLE script to detect the encoding, and double-checked in notepad2-mod.
2. Mmm, maybe "encoding" isn't the right word, I think I was still referring to the BOM type. OTOH, the character set can be changed in TCCLE by setting a different code page before entering a description. I normally use 1252.
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