Passing in non-ASCII characters via a parameter file

[Archive]

[Originally posted by tilo on 2008-04-24 00:17:00-07]

Hello,

How do I pass in non-ASCII characters through a parameter file? Do I encode the entire file in UTF-8? Or do I encode it in ASCII and use some kind of "escape character and a number" notation to pass the Unicode code points into the -TAG= parameters?
When I properly feed Unicode into exiftool, is it going to take care of all the intricacies of byte ordering, prefixing UserComment with UNICODE 0x00, etc.? Or do I have to prepare the parameters somehow before feeding them into ExifTool?

How tolerant are applications with regards to non-ASCII characters that are put into tags that officially only support ASCII? I see German umlauts in these tags sometimes, and am not aware of any problems, but strictly speaking Umlauts are not ASCII, but 8859-1 or 8859-15.

Thanks for any pointers,
Tilo

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2008-04-24 11:20:10-07]

You should read
https://exiftool.org/faq.html#Q10" target="_blank">FAQ
number 10.

By default, exiftool assumes all input is in UTF-8 and converts it
appropriately for the type of information you are writing (adding
"UNICODE\0" as necessary, etc).

Writing non-ASCII characters to ASCII tags is possible, and exiftool
passes through these characters without translation.  This is not
advisable though, because it is very likely that these characters may display
differently on different systems.  I would imagine that most software
would display them according to the default codepage for that locale,
(which would be 8859-1 for the majority of systems in North America
for instance).

- Phil