Windows: ä, ö, ü in the folder name of the user profile
Posted by Sad_Mastodon_1815@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 41 comments
Today I installed an app in the user context for a user named Markus Schär, and the corresponding profile folder where the app is installed is therefore named MarkusSchär. This app also creates registry keys in HKCU so that it can be set as the default for link types. The problem is that the app's path is written to these registry keys, and Windows is changing MarkusSchär to MarkusSchÅer. Therefore, while I can set the app as the default, it doesn't work correctly because Windows can't find the app at that path when MarkusSchÅer in the path is. How can I solve this? The users are Intune joined, but surely I can use usernames with umlauts?
siedenburg2@reddit
German here, try to not use it. While it works for windows, you'll probably get problems with other software. You also need a mail without it (so Schaer instead). You can set the shown name to include it, but not profile names or paths, or you will debug strange problems in some months (like a phone software that won't allow calls for such users)
Sad_Mastodon_1815@reddit (OP)
Aber aus welchen Daten entsteht der Name des Profilordner? Ich bin irritiert.
DefectiveLP@reddit
AD Username. Deswegen sollten umlaute automatisch entfernt werden bei der Anlage.
Sad_Mastodon_1815@reddit (OP)
AD? Wir sind Cloud only unterwegs. Es scheint so, als würde es in Entra nicht automatisch entfernt werden. Nundenn, ich habe den Benutzer auch nicht abgelegt.
siedenburg2@reddit
Bei Entra kann ich dir leider nicht sagen wie das läuft, aber du solltes eine Möglichkeit haben das Mapping anzusehen und evtl auch zu ändern.
Schade das Umlaute noch immer so ein Problem sind, aber solange man nur beim Anzeigenamen damit arbeitet klappt es ganz gut.
AmiDeplorabilis@reddit
Eventuell... Deutsch ist nicht gerade eine neue Sprache; Windows kam ca. 1991 in die Welt, und heute, 35 Jahre später, die Microsoftumwelt kann immer noch nichts richtig anfangen mit Fremdsprachen, Umlaute, usw.
LordWolke@reddit
Wenn es danach geht, ist nicht nur Microsoft das Problem. Wie viele Plattformen unterstützen nur spezifische (Sonder-)Zeichen in einem Passwort und oder Username? Man kann sogar sagen, dass die KI (Claude in meinem Fall) Probleme mit Umlauten und ẞ hat. Ich würde es daher nicht so sehr verallgemeinern und denke wir haben noch immer Glück mit unserer Dubbing-Culture in Filmen, Plattformen, etc.
DefectiveLP@reddit
Achja die nennen das ja jetzt entra und nichtmehr azure AD. Egal, gleiches Prinzip, es ist der UPN.
reni-chan@reddit
Pole here. Many years ago I was dealing with an absolutely bizzare error in Firefox that was breaking the browser for one specific family friend all the time, on multiple computers no matter how many times I reinstalled windows.
It wasn't until a few weeks later I figured out it was because his name had letter 'ł' in it. That day I learnt to never use non-ASCII characters in Windows usernames, and I would recommend you stick to that too.
Pazuuuzu@reddit
On the contrary I always use 'ő' just to see in what interesting new ways the system breaks.
ender-_@reddit
That's the way to do it.
I named my work computer ̣ (U+0323, combining dot below), and surprisingly nothing seems to have exploded in the years I've been using this yet.
ConsciousIron7371@reddit
My phone device name has zalgo text and emojis, when I connect it to car Bluetooth they won’t display it or it will show as blank.
I made a directory on our windows file share with an emoji in the folder name and the ENTIRE share became u available for everyone. Turns out the ZFS Linux (unix?) backend storage did not like how windows translated it so it renamed it to a question mark inside a black diamond, which in turn windows did not know how to handle and wouldn’t display anything.
Sure I brought down the entire network share but I also sat next to the storage admins and we had it up in ten minutes. You can’t really stop users from doing this kind of stuff so I argue it’s better to know what happens and how to fix it
ddBuddha@reddit
Off topic, but that slanty cross l is pronounced like a W right? Polish?
reni-chan@reddit
Yea it's pronounced like W in the word 'what'.
whatThePleb@reddit
Why are you doxxing a person ? I hope that's not the real name.
oscarfinn_pinguin3@reddit
I had a similar experience when setting up my first AD back then and adding the Account for family member "Hans-Jürgen".
Scince Windows has backwards compatibility till the DOS days, shouldn't it be possible to use Markussc\~1 (scince it has more than 8 chars)?
ender-_@reddit
From the description, I'm guessing that the failure is internal to some program (it seems like it's using UTF-8 internally, but then storing using active code page), so you can't control what gets written to Registry.
Argonzoyd@reddit
Wait until you encounter ő
urjuhh@reddit
Thats nothing... Try Õ / õ 😈
ender-_@reddit
Č? Or Đ or Ð?
darthereandthere@reddit
on Intune (pure Azure AD join) the profile folder name comes from the UPN prefix, not the display name. so if the UPN is
markusschär@company.com, the folder gets the umlaut too. easiest fix is to provision an ASCII UPN (markus.schaer@company.com) and keep the umlaut only in the display name. no impact on user experience, all paths stay clean.4ssw1per@reddit
this is so incorrect that it’s exactly the opposite and besides that the UPN does not even allow umlauts…
If you used to have onprem AD it synced the users samaccountname and if it’s present for a user in Entra Windows will use that. otherwise it will use the DisplayName without the whitespace.
ender-_@reddit
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've had sync failures when UPN contained non-ASCII characters.
4ssw1per@reddit
And the kicker is there is no way (that I’ve found) to set it on cloud-only environment.
Sad_Mastodon_1815@reddit (OP)
But the email is markus.schaer@. I never named the email with umlauts.
darthereandthere@reddit
yeah, intune uses the upn prefix, not the smtp email. i've seen aad set the upn to markusschär even when mail is markus.schaer. can you check the user upn in azure ad?
Sad_Mastodon_1815@reddit (OP)
Yep i will check that out tomorrow.
OhioIT@reddit
Hopefully I'll be retired before GenAlpha group become parents and kids names start containing emojis
Fun_Structure3965@reddit
don't post your users full name on the Internet...
Sad_Mastodon_1815@reddit (OP)
Thats not the real name 😂 thats only an example
fdeyso@reddit
Technically: should work.
In reality: don’t do that, i’m also coming from í,é,ó,ö,ő,ü,ű langugae
mexell@reddit
One of the areas where it really shows that a lot of foundational decisions were and are made by white, English-speaking men. By far the majority(!) of humans have non-ASCII-compliant names, lots even have totally different concepts of what constitutes a name and how, and yet here we are.
MintyNinja41@reddit
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Odd_Environment2269@reddit
Try to avoid umlauts, tildes, and em-dashes in Entra. I’m having to convert Entra data in a csv for Viva Insights reporting because we have these characters in cities and job titles
SevaraB@reddit
Here’s something you want to be aware of: regex classes don’t typically include umlauted characters. Most devs will code pattern matches that look like
/[A-Za-z0-9]/to keep track of “alphanumerics.”Last thing you want is things like your security scanners barfing because your folders use chars outside the basic set of 36 Latin chars.
Loki-L@reddit
In theory any unicode character excluding reserved ones should work, in practice it would be foolish to actually expect it to work all the time and with every program that interacts with it.
Just use an ascii version of the name instead. Remember though that depending on the language the correct way to transliterate such characters into pure ascii is not always to simply just drop the funny dots.
In German you write ä as ae were not Umlauten are allowed for example.
MeatPiston@reddit
Some applications will break in a spectacular, explosive fashion if there are “unusual” characters in the profile path. (Meaning anything not a-z 0-9). They could be perfectly normal and valid as far as Microsoft concerned, but legacy code that’s older than you is less forgiving.
Adobe products used to have this issue but don’t know if that’s been fixed.
TheBloodhoundKnight@reddit
ae, oe, ue
Always.
Zeitcon@reddit
Dane here. Been there, done that, never got a tee shirt. If you value your sanity, stick with standard English alfabet characters for passwords, folders, usernames, etc.
TeaBagTroopers@reddit
Windows has difficulties with Umlauts. To get the same effect of an Umlaut you'll want it to be ae, oe, and ue respectively.
sryan2k1@reddit
In reality windows is so old and has so much backwards compatibility that you are almost guaranteed to run into issue like this using non-ASCII characters in "Special" fields like usernames. You should stick to normal ASCII letters in usernames/email addresses/etc to avoid a world of hurt down the road.