Tip: UTF-8 and ECP (Unicode in Windows command line)

[akirot]

I always encounterd an error ("...File not found...") when using ECP working on files with a German Umlaut in the filename and/or path.
Never I spent time on this since I achieved my goal using exiftool directly.
Recently and incidently I found a (the?) solution on the exiftool forum. It works on my system:

"Unicode in Windows command line": https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=11770.0
Mentioned reference to "stackoverflow": https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57131654/using-utf-8-encoding-chcp-65001-in-command-prompt-windows-powershell-window/57134096#57134096

Might be of interest to others.

[Mario]

This is normal. Do you use old ECP presets perhaps? This has been resolved by ExifTool a long time ago...
For example, the preset "List Metadata" must look like this:

-G1
-all
-a
-charset
filename=UTF8
{Files}

The key part is

-charset
filename=UTF8

which tells ExifTool that the file name is in UTF-8 encoding.
German umlauts, Chinese, Russian or other non-ASCII characters no problem.

Which preset do you use and does it contain this specifier?

[akirot]

Aaah,
that's even better (avoiding some side effects of the other solution).
I used the "old" presets. (I continuously use IMatch and exiftool since IMatch 3.x)
The exiftool "-charset" option never came into my mind since ETGUI (which I still use outside IMatch) does work without it.

Another finding (possibly you can fix this):
Using ECP to just read (not write) some data works fine.
However, closing(!) ECP triggers the directory modified flag - requiring a rescan to get rid of it.
Not the preset execution triggers the flag, closing ECP does it.
Having an explorer window open in parallel I don't see any temp file(s) created.
Since I keep my filesystem (and especially IMatch) clean this is irritating.

Can this be avoided please? (Propably you have added a "brute force" trigger to ECP close to be on the safe side?)

[Mario]

Since IMatch cannot know what you did in the ECP, it always marks the folder as pending.
Doing a quick rescan to check for new or updated or deleted files. Why is this a problem? This is super fast and you usually won't even notice this.
Also, Windows may sent "folder modified" notifications to IMatch for a wide range of reasons. Which then causes IMatch to do a quick scan.