# Mathematica 10 doesn't support path containing Chinese characters

Bug introduced in 10.0 and fixed in 10.0.2

I tried to import file in Mathematica 10 ( windows 7 system), the path contains some chinese characters. After holding ctrl+shift, and drag the file into front end. I got path like

c:\\Users\\m&p\\Desktop\\桌面\\test.txt

But after running

Import["c:\\Users\\m&p\\Desktop\\\:684c\:9762\\test.txt"]


Mathematica 10 gives error message as follows:

What should I do to make mathematica 10 support path containing Chinese characters?

• What kind of computer are you using: Macintosh, Raspberry Pi, Linux, or Windows? – librik Jul 17 '14 at 2:41
• Works fine on OS X. This is expected to be OS-dependent. Are you on Windows? What language version of Windows? There's also a setting in Windows (which I don't know where it is anymore, as I don't have a Windows computer here) that will adjust the character set for software that doesn't support Unicode. If you like to use Chinese path names, it's worth setting that to Chinese. Otherwise non-Unicode-aware Windows programs won't see those paths. – Szabolcs Jul 17 '14 at 2:48
• Possibly related: "Bug in handling backslashed Cyrillic symbols in v.10.0.0?" – Alexey Popkov Jul 17 '14 at 4:26
• I can reproduce this under win8.1, and the slash (/) workaround in the Q/A linked by @AlexeyPopkov works fine. – Silvia Jul 17 '14 at 19:04
• @AlexeyPopkov Yes, I confirm that if I put a special character after \, I also got strange character code under Linux. – Yi Wang Jul 18 '14 at 6:39

In Mathematica 10.0.0 for Windows, I have experienced similar problems.
When non-ASCII characters were placed after \ in a string, they were decoded in a strange way. (Character '\' is used as a path separator in Windows).

ToCharacterCode["\\a", "Unicode"](*OK*)
{92, 97}

ToCharacterCode["\\", "Unicode"](*OK*)
{92}

ToCharacterCode["μ", "Unicode"](*OK*)
{956}

ToCharacterCode["\\μ", "Unicode"](*Strange!*)
{92, 92, 58, 48, 51, 98, 99}


"μ" in this expample can be some Chinese/Japanese characters. It makes a severe problem because this sometimes happens in file path such as "C:\MyData\μ-channel\" in Windows. You could avoid this problem by using "c:/MyData/μ-channel/".

• Have you already reported this to Wolfram support? – Szabolcs Jul 17 '14 at 14:37
• Yes. I have reported the problem at 7/14 ([CASE:1213192]). But no responses yet. – Tetsuo Ichii Jul 17 '14 at 15:02
• (Updated) I received a reply today from Wolfram research: "... I am able to reproduce the issue you found and will file a report on it. ...". – Tetsuo Ichii Jul 17 '14 at 23:58
• @TetsuoIchii So this is a bug? – matheorem Jul 18 '14 at 14:47
• Yes. I think it is a bug. Please try "c:/Users/m&p/Desktop/桌面/test.txt" to circumvent the problem. – Tetsuo Ichii Jul 19 '14 at 15:39