Can not ZIP folder with odd chars. Windowqs XP

[Geek-9pm]

I tried this in Windows XP.
I have a folder called 'BigBag' that has a lot of stuff I no longer use, but I do not want to throw away. I thought I could reduce the size a bit by making it into a ZIP folder. Something went wrong. Very wrong. I made a quick screen shot before I stopped the process. (The process looked like it was stuck.)
Screenshot cropped and color reduced to save bandwidth.
Read the message in  the box. I have never, ever seen this. 


[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]

[DaveLembke]

Is keeping the file within the structure of the rest of the data important or can you move it outside of the scope of the zipped folder and have an uncompressed folder named PartofBigBag then place this folder + zipped folder within a folder such as OldData then the zip process should be fine and you have most of your data compressed.

I havent run into this specific issue but did have once an issue with defrag puking on not wanting to defragment a hard drive with 15% free and large video game installation files that were acting like a defrag roadblock. My solution was to move the files that defrag puked on working around to a different drive, defragging the drive and then repopulating the drive with the files that defrag puked on with XP.

Apples to Oranges since your dealing with Zipping (compression) and I was dealing with Defragmentation, but somes it can be picky and creative work arounds are needed.

Getting back to zipping I have also run into path being too long to compress before as well, solution with that was to shorten the path to compress.

[Geek-9pm]

Yeah, something about long files names or lots of spaces in the name.
After some testing,  I had to remove one file and one directory to do the job.
An issue is where other files link to the directory or file you need to rename.

Moral: Avoid long files names or spaces in file names if you can. 

[BC_Programmer]

ZIP files can only store the original IBM PC character encoding set. The Pi character is Unicode.

[Geek-9pm]

ZIP files can only store the original IBM PC character encoding set. The Pi character is Unicode.

Thank you. I had no idea.
But ZIP can do binary files, - right?
But it wants text to be just  ASCII?
Good to know!   

[Salmon Trout]

But ZIP can do binary files, - right?
But it wants text to be just  ASCII?

Just the file names.

https://marcosc.com/2008/12/zip-files-and-encoding-i-hate-you/

[Geek-9pm]

Salmon Trout, How did you ever find that?

“for example a French, German or Spanish Windows user cannot exchange files that contain [file names with] French, German or Spanish accents with a French, German or Spanish Macintosh users”

(From the link above.)

I am going to roll my eyes... 

[Salmon Trout]

Salmon Trout, How did you ever find that?

[Salmon Trout]

The 7z archive format has no trouble with Unicode characters in file names, apparently. Also RAR.

[SuperDave]

It would seem to me to be a lot easier to save it to a thumb drive or CD.

[Geek-9pm]

It would seem to me to be a lot easier to save it to a thumb drive or CD.

Right. After all the fuss, it did not save much drive space. I should just build a library on a 25 cent DVD disc.