Does BitTorrent protocol support international / unusual characters in the downloaded filename?

[DanielAmnis]

Hello there,

Well as you know, Amazon's S3 storage service supports the Torrent protocol out-of-the-box. Great!

But I'm having a reproducable problem with it (as you can see here https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=415666 ). In a nutshell, when the filename of the file that I'm downloading via torrent (*not* the filename of the .torrent file) contains any "fruity" characters - eg. Greek characters, Japanese characters, accented alphabetic characters - then torrent downloader clients will always fail to start downloading the file. If you change the name of the same file to something without said characters, it works!

So basically I was wondering a few things:

[] Is this a limitation of the BitTorrent protocol itself?

[] Is this a quirk of Amazon's S3 torrent seeding?

[] Generally, away from the world of S3, have any of you been able to make a downloadable torrent from a file whose name has international characters in it?

[] <noob>I suppose I also would like to know what are some ways or tools to make a torrent file myself? (again away from S3). This would be a good way to test the protocol in isolation.</noob>

Thanks for your time. I wonder how it works for you guys?

- Daniel

[Harold Feit]

[] Is this a limitation of the BitTorrent protocol itself?

No. Filenames in torrent files are to be encoded UTF-8

[] Is this a quirk of Amazon's S3 torrent seeding?

Most likely.

[] Generally, away from the world of S3, have any of you been able to make a downloadable torrent from a file whose name has international characters in it?

Myself, mostly with japanese and korean characters.

[] <noob>I suppose I also would like to know what are some ways or tools to make a torrent file myself? (again away from S3). This would be a good way to test the protocol in isolation.</noob>

File -> Create new torrent in the bittorrent client. is one example.

[DanielAmnis]

Awesome information Harold, thanks.

I did think that it would be strange for a relatively new format not to work with non-ASCII characters.

I'll try to create a few torrents myself and meanwhile I'll keep pestering the Amazon crew.

Thanks.