Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] non English characters

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 30, 2011, at 11:30 PM, Maxim Uvarov wrote:

> Is there any way to make tshark or wireshark to show non English
> characters (for example Russian)? Pcap file has write symbols but
> after unrolling them with tshark it substitutes dots instead of
> original characters. Hex info shows the right information but ascii
> has only dots. It is known issue?

In the hex/ASCII dump pane, we will probably never show bytes other than printable ASCII characters as anything other than "."; there's no easy way to determine the character encoding of particular parts of the hex dump, and there isn't even a guarantee that there's a one-to-one correspondence between bytes and characters (consider UTF-8, Asian double-byte character sets, etc.), or even that bytes in the range 0x00 to 0x7F are ASCII - they might be EBCDIC.

However, we *would* like to do a better job of handling non-ASCII characters in strings in the packet list and packet detail panes, allowing not just UTF-8 and UTF-16 but other encodings for protocols that use them.  We don't have that yet.