The history of the path separator in Japanese and Korean Windows

Date:October 14, 2005 / year-entry #307
Tags:history
Orig Link:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051014-20/?p=33753
Comments:    10
Summary:Why is the path separator on Japanese Windows the ¥ character? And why is it the ₩ character on Korean Windows? I've been prodding Michael Kaplan to delve into the history of this quirk, and he finally gave in to my repeated badgering. (Additional discussion on the Korean Won sign, the Japanese Yen sign, and...

Why is the path separator on Japanese Windows the ¥ character? And why is it the ₩ character on Korean Windows? I've been prodding Michael Kaplan to delve into the history of this quirk, and he finally gave in to my repeated badgering. (Additional discussion on the Korean Won sign, the Japanese Yen sign, and currency symbols in general.)

Comments (10)
  1. michkap says:
    October 14, 2005 at 10:29 am

    I never think of it as badgering. There are just so many things to talk about.

    Or maybe I just talk too much. :-)

  2. flyingxu says:
    October 14, 2005 at 10:37 am

    But why in Chinese Windows, it is ”? Can you ask Michael Kaplan again?

  3. Raymond Chen - MSFT says:
    October 14, 2005 at 10:51 am

    Larry Osterman already discussed why the backslash character is the path separator.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432386.aspx

    If you want to ask Michael Kaplan a question, you can do it yourself on his web site.

  4. woops says:
    October 14, 2005 at 1:24 pm

    I’ve always wondered what made them decide to use in the first place.

  5. Matthew Chaboud says:
    October 14, 2005 at 1:37 pm

    This still doesn’t really explain why the Yen and Won would end up at 0x5c. It’s really what I expected, because it’s the answer to most of these questions in computing:

    Legacy.

  6. michkap says:
    October 14, 2005 at 4:43 pm

    Matthew — these are National standards in Japan and Korea, and they are still used. When we assign code points in Unicode, we usually do not call that "legacy" so we should probably not do that for JIS or KSC. :-)

  7. Stu says:
    October 15, 2005 at 4:41 am

    Surely this makes coversion between character sets far harder? How does windows know weather the YEN or WON symbol it encounters is supposed to be a path seperator and converted to 0x5C or an actual currency symbol?

    (Supposing we’re converting from unicode to Latin-1 or something…)

  8. mpz says:
    October 15, 2005 at 7:51 am

    This quirk is more annoying than you may think. In the default MS IME (that comes with Windows XP), if you type in the yen sign, it allows you to henkan it to either U+005C (backslash) or U+FFE5 (fullwidth yen). U+00A5 (the "correct" halfwidth yen) is nowhere to be found.

    This is no problem when using non-Unicode applications in a Japanese locale (since for them backslash *is* the halfwidth yen), but when you try to enter the correct yen sign to a Unicode application from the keyboard, you only get backslashes. Of course you can get the correct character from Character Map but it’s a pain…

    (I suppose there is no way to make the MS IME know whether it’s sending characters to a Unicode or a non-Unicode application and decide whether to send a U+00A5 or a U+005C based on that?)

  9. Norman Diamond says:
    October 16, 2005 at 11:34 pm

    It gets weirder. When is a backslash not a backslash? When you’re reading a different part than you’re going to read a minute later, in the exact same page that was cited in Michael Kaplan’s blog.

    Why does Internet Explorer display one as not a backslash and display another as a backslash in the exact same page? Conspiracy minded cynics might guess that Internet Explorer read Mr. Kaplan’s wording calling it a backslash and intentionally rendered that one as not a backslash. Ordinary cynics think Internet Explorer isn’t smart enough to do that, and give up at this point.

    Screenshots:

    http://www.geocities.jp/hitotsubishi/backslash_blog.png

    http://www.geocities.jp/hitotsubishi/backslash_blog_2.png

  10. The Old New Thing : On the fuzzy definition of a "Unicode application" says:
    March 15, 2006 at 10:00 am

    PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/15/551897.aspx

Comments are closed.


*DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT. If you are the owner and would like it removed, please contact me. The content herein is an archived reproduction of entries from Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing" Blog (most recent link is here). It may have slight formatting modifications for consistency and to improve readability.

WHY DID I DUPLICATE THIS CONTENT HERE? Let me first say this site has never had anything to sell and has never shown ads of any kind. I have nothing monetarily to gain by duplicating content here. Because I had made my own local copy of this content throughout the years, for ease of using tools like grep, I decided to put it online after I discovered some of the original content previously and publicly available, had disappeared approximately early to mid 2019. At the same time, I present the content in an easily accessible theme-agnostic way.

The information provided by Raymond's blog is, for all practical purposes, more authoritative on Windows Development than Microsoft's own MSDN documentation and should be considered supplemental reading to that documentation. The wealth of missing details provided by this blog that Microsoft could not or did not document about Windows over the years is vital enough, many would agree an online "backup" of these details is a necessary endeavor. Specifics include:

<-- Back to Old New Thing Archive Index