Copy & paste from Win to Mac showing up as chinese characters

Szil · 2021-01-05T16:58:07+00:00

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I use teamviewer to control a Mac Mini from a Windows PC. Everything works great, except copy & paste has started sending (or pasting) chinese characters on the Mac. This functionality used to work fine, and the only changes are OS updates on both machines and teamviewer updates. I have checked the language setting on both computers, and set both to English. Copy & paste on the Mac itself works fine, only when pasting text from the Windows PC to the Mac via teamviewer do the chinese characters show up. Any help correcting this would be appreciated.

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sonofsmog

This is trash. This still occurs in 2025. I am going to complain no end!!

Siva

Hi @mrwide
Have you found any solution/workaround for this issue?

The issue is not only between different OSs. I have this issue between two Macs too.

I am using FileMaker. Whatever I copy, paste from source to remote or vice versa, it is pasted as junk characters at FileMaker. It happens at bot the ends.

If I paste the content into a text editor like TextMate or BBEdit even Pages, no issues. I can copy the content again from text editor and paste it in FileMaker without issues. Do you think, it is FileMaker issue?

mrwide

On the other hand, TeamViewer knows in which direction it is converting the clipboard, and could use the correct UTF-16 endianness expected by the target operating system.

Thus when I copy text between computers, it should use the endianness of the target computer.

When I copy from remote to my local computer (a mac), it should put BIG endian UTF-16 in the local 'public.utf16-plain-text' clipboard flavour.
When I copy from remote to my local computer (a pc), it should put LITTLE endian UTF-16 in the local 'public.utf16-plain-text' clipboard flavour.
And ditto for the other direction based on the OS of the remote machine!

Calling TeamViewer DEVs! ^^^^THIS ^^^^

mrwide

So, I have caught a screen video of the problem - that is the public.utf16-plain-text clipboard flavour:

@TeamViewer Peeps - Please take a look at this:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/998250272

…however, the problem seems to be deeper than just a simple bug in TeamViewer code…rather it is an (universal) underlying problem with UTF16…😳

The problem is that the 'endianness' of the UTF16 is different on different systems, and that there is no clear & *accepted* standard for which way round the bytes should be interpreted.

Windows uses little-endian encoding, Mac big-endian encoding.

Wikipedia on the topic of UTF16 points out the problem and suggests as a solution a correction of the endianness (via a rule-of-thumb-interpretation) on the receiving side:

"If the BOM is missing, RFC 2781 recommends that big-endian (BE) encoding be assumed. In practice, due to Windows using little-endian (LE) order by default, many applications assume little-endian encoding. It is also reliable to detect endianness by looking for null bytes, on the assumption that characters less than U+0100 are very common. If more even bytes (starting at 0) are null, then it is big-endian."

Since the public.utf16-plain-text clipboard flavour seems to have no BOM, the endianness is more or less up for grabs.

Thus the suggested solution would probably lead to a good solution for copy & paste of english / ascii text but it may well ruin the copy & paste behaviour for people copy and pasting text containing chinese & other 'higher end' characters.

To me the solution seems to be for apps to avoid using utf-16 where possible! - and that is not a TV problem!

JohnEDee

Unfortunately the Clipboard synchronization setting toggling (including Apply) didn't work for me. I had posted back in February 2022 that a TV version update fixed it, but the issue returned in a future version.

Just to add more info to this issue, sometimes if you copy something from a remote host, paste it into BBEdit on your local machine, you'll see every character interspersed with a red question mark, representing an unprintable character. If you then use BBEdit's Zap Gremlins feature to see what they are, you'll see that they are "\0x00", which is null. So for some reasons null are being added after every character when copying. I see this issue when copying from a Stickies note.

Other times, if you copy something into BBEdit, it strips the double-byte or whatever it is and you can then re-copy/paste it, avoiding the Chinese character problem. I see this issue when copying and pasting the TV password from the remote TV Status dialog.

theprojectgroup

Just ran into this on macOS full client 15.48.4 (Sonoma 14.1.1) to Windows 10 (22h2 19045.3693) host 15.47.3 HC (32-bit):

This fixed it for me:

drh27

I started having this issue between Windows and Linux machines around March of 2022 and it still persists intermittently through 15.40.8 with the same version installed on Host and Client.

Siva

Issue still persists in version 15.35.7

PedroCastello

I have the same problem. Any solution?

PedroCastello

I have the same problem. Any solution?

Siva

Issue still persists with v15.31.5

JohnEDee

After some back-and-forth and (useless) uninstalling/reinstalling, they finally said to try the recently-released v15.27 on both Host and Client Macs; I updated to that version on both and it seems to have solved the problem!

This does seems to be a bug that occasionally regresses back into the code for some reason, so we might see it again. 😒

nziegler

I have the same issue. Any response from the tech support yet?

JohnEDee

Having this issue in Feb 2022, but also pasting double-byte Chinese characters even when exchanging clipboard from remote Mac to local Mac. I'm opening a tech support ticket, will post here what happens.

Jodie_W

Whoa, I'm having the same issue. It's an expensive product, to have a bug such as this left unresolved for so long.

BaseTV2021

There has been an open ticket [removed per Community Guidelines] with them since Jan 11th 21. Haven't heard back and sent an email asking for an update March 26th 2021.

sturmadin

same - unresolved current version 15.15.5

gfay63

I have this issue too!!! So frustrating. Last several weeks. Essentially when I paste a URL into iMessage on the Mac, it is Chinese characters. I have to paste into the Chrome address bar first, then copy-paste from there to iMessage.

Szil

No, still have the same issue. I've removed & re-installed teamviewer on both machines, set language to english on both, same result. Must be a bug in this version of teamviewer. Maybe they'll fix it in the next release.

jbrenton

I'm having the same issue. Did you ever resolve it?