Unicode named Folder shows ? in wscript prompt

Question

I am facing problems with Unicode named folders. When I drag the folder to the script, it doesn't show the path of the folder properly.

Simple VBScript (this is just a portion of it):

Dim Wshso : Set Wshso = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Dim FSO : Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

If WScript.Arguments.Count = 1 Then
    If FSO.FileExists(Wscript.Arguments.Item(0)) = true and FSO.FolderExists(Wscript.Arguments.Item(0)) = false Then
        Alert "You dragged a file, not a folder! My god." & vbcrlf & "Script will terminate immediately", 0, "Alert: User is stupid", 48
        WScript.Quit
    Else
        targetDir = WScript.Arguments.Item(0)
        Wshso.Popup targetDir
    End If
Else
    targetDir = Wshso.SpecialFolders("Desktop")
    Alert "Note: No folder to traverse detected, default set to:" & vbcrlf & Wshso.SpecialFolders("Desktop"), 0, "Alert", 48
End If

If it is a normal path without Unicode characters, it's fine. But in this case: Directory: 4minute (포미닛) - Hit Your Heart

Then it will show something like 4minute (?) - Hit Your Heart

And if I do a FolderExists it can't find the dragged folder.

Is there any workaround to support Unicode named Folders?

Thanks!

I'll edit if this is not clear enough

Answer 1

This does seem to be a problem peculiar to the Windows Script Host's DropHandler shell extension. Whereas:

test.vbs "C:\포미닛.txt"
C:\WINDOWS\System32\WScript.exe "test.vbs" "C:\포미닛.txt"

both work when typed from the console (even if the console can't render the Hangul so it looks like ?), a drag and drop operation that should result in the same command goes through a Unicode->ANSI->Unicode translation that loses all characters that aren't in the current ANSI code page. (So 포미닛 will work on a default Korean Windows install but not Western.)

I'm not aware of a proper way to fix the problem. You could perhaps work around it by changing the DropHandler for .vbs files in the registry:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VBSFile\ShellEx\DropHandler\(Default)

from the WSH DropHandler ({60254CA5-953B-11CF-8C96-00AA00B8708C}) to {86C86720-42A0-1069-A2E8-08002B30309D}, the one used for .exe, .bat and similar, which doesn't suffer from this issue. You would also probably have to change the file association for .vbs to put quotes around the filename argument too, since the EXE DropHandler doesn't, to avoid problems with spaces in filenames.

Since this affects argument-passing for all VBS files it would be a perilous fix to deploy on any machine but your own. If you needed to do that, maybe you could try creating a new file extension with the appropriate DropTarget rather than changing VBSFile itself? Or maybe forgo drop-onto-script behaviour and provide a file Open dialog or manual drop field instead.