Character encoding of filenames in the zotero.sqlite database

florisvdh · November 23, 2015

Hi,
I want to extract a list of all file attachment paths from my Zotero Standalone library. It is quite easy to find this list of paths in the zotero.sqlite database, using SQLite Manager. However, special characters appear in these paths, e.g.

attachments:M/Manceur_KÃ¼hn_2014_MethodsEcolEvol.pdf
instead of
attachments:M/Manceur_Kühn_2014_MethodsEcolEvol.pdf

Still, within Zotero, such linked file names are shown as normal.

Any ideas on how to solve this? I use Zotero Standalone 4.0.28 with ZotFile 4.1.6 on Linux Mint Qiana.

adamsmith · November 23, 2015

my guess would be character composition of the umlaut for the author, which Zotero itself may interpret correctly, but sqlite or whatever you use to read from sqlite doesn't. try manually typing the ü in the author field for that article, rename via Zotfile, and see if that fixes it.

dstillman · November 23, 2015

No, they're in an opaque Mozilla-specific format. We're changing that in 5.0, but for now some code from the dataserver may be useful:

https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/blob/0426215ffcdd48c0fa3e6daad1fc6af003e575e0/model/Attachments.inc.php#L235

florisvdh · November 25, 2015

OK, thanks for the suggestions. For now I have done manual corrections in the exported directory list, using 'search and replace' (in leafpad).