Encoding and decoding error in non-English name of compressed file

Solution 1:

Perhaps the graphical archive program does not understand Chinese. Try extracting the archive using the command-line:

1. Open a terminal.

2. Navigate to the directory containing the file:

   cd /path/to/directory/
   

   You can use the Tab key to complete filenames and directory names. Double press Tab to get a list of possible completions in case there is more than one option.

3. Run the unrar program to unpack filename.rar:

   unrar x filename.rar
   

   Here, you can use tab-completion too for the filename.

4. The contents of the archive will be visible in the current directory.

Solution 2:

Looks like the filename usres a different character encoding than your environment. The character ѧ (CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER LITTLE YUS) is most likely not part of a Chinese file name.

Do you have any information about the operating system and language settings the file has been created in? Do you know which character encodings are common to encode Chinese file names?

If you know the filenames's encoding you can use convmv (not installed by default) to convert it to the encoding you use (most likely UTF-8).

Solution 3:

I had the same issue with rar-file that contained names with Cyrillic letters. I was able to fix it by reinstalling unrar as it is suggested here:

$ sudo apt-get remove rar
$ sudo apt-get remove unrar
$ sudo apt-get install unrar

It turned out that by default the open source version of rar & unrar utilities is installed in Ubuntu: "unrar 0.0.1 Copyright (C) 2004 Ben Asselstine, Jeroen Dekkers". This version does not handle non-ascii symbols well.

After reinstalling the unrar the actual version of it installed from "restricted" (proprietary software) repository (note that this should be enabled in your update settings): "UNRAR 5.40 freeware Copyright (c) 1993-2016 Alexander Roshal"

This version handles Unicode symbols, at least it worked for me with Cyrillic letters.

Note that removing open source version of rar/unrar also fixed an issue with GUI software: