Re: Accented Characters in Finder Names
Re: Accented Characters in Finder Names
- Subject: Re: Accented Characters in Finder Names
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 23:07:21 -0800
On 12/26/03 2:38 PM, "Christopher Nebel" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
Paul's explanation is essentially correct, except that it's not
>
AppleScript insisting on decomposed characters, but the file system.
>
HFS+ stores everything decomposed (or tries to -- you can finagle this
>
using shell commands, but I don't recommend it); AppleScript doesn't
>
really care one way or the other, but tries to preserve whatever it was
>
given.
I found this out recently. There's a real oddity (yeah, another one ;-))
with Address Book. When you type in accented Roman characters into Address
Book, at least using English and French and - I'm sure - other Western
European keyboards, they are accepted as pre-composed characters. As you
say, AppleScript faithfully transcribes those and gives them back the same
way.
BUT - there's one exception. The "My Card" data - your own contact card - is
preformed automatically from the data gathered by the "Welcome to OS X"
dialogs when you first install OS X. And if your name happens to include an
accented character - guess what? The OS uses decomposed characters. Or
perhaps wherever it is deep in the HFS+ system files that stores the admin
user's personal data that converts what you type into decomposed characters.
So that's what Address Book gets for the My Card.
I finally worked this out when my script that syncs Entourage contacts to
Address Book kept erroring for one user when he took the option to check for
deletions. (Entourage uses precomposed characters.) Since the script
couldn't find his own name (precomposed, Entourage-style) in any Address
Book contact, it wanted to delete the Me Contact in Entourage - which
fortunately is illegal in the version of Entourage he's using, so the script
broke instead. It didn't seem to make any sense since his name was there
loud and clear as the My Card of Address Book. Only it wasn't the same name:
it had decomposed accent characters. When he retyped his own name manually
in his My Card - including the accents - everything worked fine. The issue
did not crop again with any of the hundreds of French and German contacts in
his Address Book. Only with his own contact.
AppleScript faithfully registered both versions of the accented characters -
precomposed in Entourage, decomposed (until altered manually) in Address
Book. I imagine that the issue probably crops up with other kinds of Address
Book syncing - iSync, etc. Probably Address Book should convert decomposed
accents to precomposed when transcribing the user name derived from the
system, since all its other, typed accents are precomposed.
--
Paul Berkowitz
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