Das Werkstatt

Posted: **Sun Dec 22, 2013 7:02 pm**

[PROBLEM]
A friend of mine brought me a Russian audio CD as a gift: "Easy USSR"
I prefer having my music collection in file-based form, so I rip audio CDs to a harddisk.
The metadata (author, title) was available for all CD tracks, but the tags as well as the filenames of the generated files were displayed in a non-readable way.

For example, the artist is displayed like this in the filename:

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ÎÝÌÈ_ïó_Â.Ìåùåðèíà

Inside the audio player "Clementine" the encoding was interpreted differently, so it looked something like this:

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ÃÃÃÃ Ã¯Ã³ Ã.ÃÃ¥Ã¹Ã¥Ã°Ã¨ÃÃ

.
(Note: some non-printable characters between the "Ã" characters can't be displayed in here as text...

But actually the author's name should read something like this:

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"ОЭМИ пу В.Мещерина"

.

This CD is just an example of how cyrillic can be mis-interpreted due to encoding inconsistencies. My problem was that I am completely unfamiliar with cyrillic codepages and therefore couldn't even say which encodings the mis-interpreted versions actually used.

There are different cyrillic encodings and now I had to find out which one should be used in my case.

[SOLUTION]
You can use your browser to find out which encoding to use

I found a list of all track titles of "Easy USSR" on "cdtrrracks.com".
(NOTE: URL links with non-ascii characters are not interpreted correctly by phpBB at the moment)

That site (luckily) also has encoding problems with cyrillic chars, so I could find it by searching the wrongly encoded string.
For example track #7:

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Êóáà,ìîÿ Êóáà

Now I could use the character encoding options from the Firefox browser to test when it would display correctly.
Switching through "View > Character Encoding > More Encodings > East European > Cyrillic*", I found that in this case it was "Cyrillic Windows 1251".

Then I simply created an empty HTML file, copy/pasted the wrongly encoded text as "<pre>" block and set the encoding to "windows-1251":

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<html>
    <head>
        <meta content="text/html;charset=windows-1251" />
    </head>

    <body>
        <pre>
        1       Ïî äîðîãå â øêîëó       3:29
        2       Þìîðåñêà        3:21
        3       Òàíöóåì øåéê        2:57
        4       Íà äà÷å         2:15
        5       Öàðåâíà-Ëÿãóøêà         1:50
        6       Êàê çàÿö ëèñó ïåðåõèòðèë        1:23
        7       Êóáà,ìîÿ Êóáà       2:55
        8       Ïîñëåäíèé ãîä â øêîëå       2:38
        9       Ýëü Áèìáî       2:17
        10      Òàíåö ýôèîïñêîãî øóòà       2:04
        11      Òàíåö ïèíãâèíîâ         2:42
        12      Íà êîëõîçíîé ïòèöåôåðìå         2:12
        13      Íà ïëÿæå        2:55
        14      Òàíöóþùèå ãíîìû         3:28
        15      Íà áåðåãó ëàçóðíîãî çàëèâà      6:14
        16      Êîãäà íà óëèöå ìîðîç        2:09
        17      Ëÿãóøêè         1:50
        18      Íî÷íàÿ ìåëîäèÿ      3:11
        19      Ãàëîï ¹2        1:39
        20      Ôàíòàçèè íà ïåðóàíñêèå òåìû         8:02
        21      Ìóçûêàëüíûé ÿùèê        1:19
        22      Âîçäóøíàÿ êóêóðóçà      5:16
        23      Äèñê ñ äàííûìè      0:08
        </pre>
    </body>
</html>

Now, just open this HTML file in your browser and the encoding will be correct

In my case I was lucky to find the site which contained my strings, but for all other strings you can use the same mechanism.

Das Werkstatt

Cyrillic characters wrongly encoded

Cyrillic characters wrongly encoded