Faulty character in Tatar translator file name

cliveholtham · August 20, 2012

This file name has what appears to be an "i" before the js
but in Windows XP it is an unknown character which causes the file to be unreadable and uncopyable. This then prevents the whole of Zotero from being internally backed up!

Tatar zamanı.js

Rintze · August 20, 2012

FWIW, the "Tatar zamanı.js" file does exist on my system (Windows XP SP3) and I can copy and rename it, so this doesn't seem to be a limitation of the operating system. It still might make sense to avoid non-Latin letters, though.

cliveholtham · August 20, 2012

Thanks for this. It probably therefore relates to some background software such as malware checking, which does look out for unexpected filename characters. To delete the file involved going into the obscurity of the command line. I am guessing it will recur on every auto-update until the translator filename can be changed, so have switched off auto-update.

ajlyon · August 20, 2012

I didn't bother to remove the character, since we already had non-ASCII characters in some of the French translators. I can obviously rename it, but it shouldn't be an issue on properly set-up systems. It's pretty bad if there's malware software that is triggered by non-ASCII (and non-Latin-1, for that matter) characters, so please register this issue with them as well, as there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have such a character in a filename.

adamsmith · August 20, 2012

I vaguely remember an exploit using the ı (pretending to be an i) so this may be much more specific than just non-ASCII.

@cliveholtham - IIRC, though, you can just change the filename in your local copy of the Zotero translator directory and it won't revert back on updates (if you delete the file, though, it will be restored on auto-update).