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Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: ecelca on February 16, 2003, 04:33:24 AM

Title: Does AVAST 4 handles non-latin file name?
Post by: ecelca on February 16, 2003, 04:33:24 AM

I am using AVAST 4 (build 168) on Windows 2000 professional (English version).  It seems that the program does not handle non-latin filename correctly.
1. If I try to execute an executable with non-latin filename (say in Chinese, Japanese), the avast icon does not rotate and the "last scanned file" of resident protection does not report the file.
2. If I right click on the file in Windows Explorer,  the menu shows "scan ???".  And if I choose the menu, AVAST reports that it cannot find the file.

I guess that the filename are stored in Unicode.  I wonder if AVAST can handle these non-latin file names.
Thanks.

Yue

Title: Re:Does AVAST 4 handles non-latin file name?
Post by: Vlk on February 16, 2003, 08:47:12 AM

Good question  ;).

Currently, all parts of avast 4 except for the boot-time scanner are ANSI-only, i.e. not Unicode. This is mainly to maintain compatibility with Win9x (which doesn't support Unicode at all). The boot-time scan, on the other hand, is fully Unicode and should be able to open/scan any file in your system.

In short, you're right, avast! is not fully ready for the East-Asian market at the moment.

This may change in future versions.

Sorry for that,
Vlk

Title: Re:Does AVAST 4 handles non-latin file name?
Post by: goa103 on February 19, 2003, 02:14:57 PM

Hello,

UNICODE support is a big issue in most of the applications :(. But It's quite easy to implement in your software. If you use MSDev to develop AVAST, you can just use the _T ("") UNICODE macro. Then you just have to release 2 versions of your software, one for Windows 95-98 and an other one for Windows 2000-XP. It's just about defining UNICODE or not.

The quickest way to convert your source code from ANSI to UNICODE is to use Search/Replace regular expressions. If you need help or more information about that process, don't hesitate to ask.

Title: Re:Does AVAST 4 handles non-latin file name?
Post by: Vlk on February 20, 2003, 08:46:51 AM

Jean-Marc,

thanks for your posting.
Our developers are certainly aware of the UNICODE and _T() macros, but the thing is that porting a piece of code from ANSI to UNICODE is by far not as simple as it seems. There are many internal problems, such as different buffer sizes that have to be passed between functions (usually measured by the sizeof operator), trickier file I/O if one needs to maintain compatibility with ANSI versions, and so on... I absolutely don't agree that a mere search/replace operation can reliably convert a project from ANSI to UNICODE.

On the other hand, we are planning a fully Unicode version - we realize that for almost half of the world (East Asia, India, Arab countries etc.) it is a must.

Thanks again
Vlk