Decompress files with foreign characters in file names on Mac

quotation markI have zip archive compressed in Windows and filenames with Chinese characters are not correctly decompressed on Mac using the default unarchive app. How can I properly unzip archive files with foreign characters in file names on Mac?

Mac use the UTF8 encoding for the file names encoding. If your archive file was not saved in Unicode encoding(UTF-8). You may ran into this problem. In such case, you can zip the document in the last program you saved it with on Windows PC and make sure to use the Unicode UTF-8 encoding. If you don’t have the source documents or do not have a zip program on Windows computer, you need to use a third-party unarchive program on Mac that can handle the filename encoding.

The Unarchiver is a small and easy to use program that can unarchive files saved in many different encoding standards. Find and download this free software from Mac App Store. Find the compressed file on your desktop or in Finder. Right click or Control-click on it. Select Open with item from the context menu. Choose The Unarchiver as the new default app to open this kind of archive files. Click the Change All… button. Then click Continue in the next pop-up dialogue.

Now double click on the archive file on your desktop or in Finder. Choose a location and folder, click Extract to decompress it. The unzip app will firstly try to detect the filename encoding automatically. If it failed to do so, you will be prompted to manually select the filename encoding.

the unarchiver app Mac choose filename encoding

What if you don’t know what encoding was used to compress the files. Is there any way of decompressing the zip file without knowing the encoding it was compressed with? The Unarchive app for Mac has included almost all the encoding methods. Simply choose a filename encoding standard in the list, you can then preview the result instantly before extracting the files.