Relative .md links with Chinese (non-ASCII) paths fail: percent-encoded path treated as literal file

[henggongchina]

Summary

Clicking a relative Markdown link whose path contains non-ASCII (e.g. Chinese) directory/file names fails with “does not exist”. The error path shows percent-encoded segments used as a literal filesystem path, and the intermediate Chinese directory segment appears to be lost.

Images with relative Chinese paths in the same document render correctly; only navigation links to other .md files fail.

Environment

• mdview 4.0.1 (Windows x64), installed via winget install c3er.mdview
• Install path example: D:\Tools\mdview\mdview.exe
• OS: Windows 10/11

Steps to reproduce

1. Create this layout (UTF-8 paths):

docs/
  计划/
    plan.md
  证据/
    note.md

2. In docs/计划/plan.md:

# Plan

See [note](../证据/note.md)

3. Open plan.md in mdview.
4. Click the note link.

Expected

Opens:

…\docs\证据\note.md

Actual

Error dialog similar to:

Cannot display: "…\docs\%E8%AF%81%E6%8D%AE-….md" does not exist

Notes from a real case:

• Source link in Markdown (correct): ../证据/证据-APT10-资源管理器内存OOM-2026-07-17.md
• Real file exists at: …\docs\证据\证据-APT10-资源管理器内存OOM-2026-07-17.md
• Error path was under docs\ with a percent-encoded filename, missing the 证据\ directory (or treating %E8%AF%81%E6%8D%AE… literally).

Same-folder ASCII links such as ./other-ascii.md work. Cross-directory links with Chinese path components fail.

Suspected cause

HTML/href uses URL-encoding for non-ASCII path segments, but local file open does not decodeURIComponent (and/or path join drops the encoded directory segment).

Workaround

Open the target file via File → Open, or use another preview (e.g. VS Code / Cursor) for cross-document navigation. Document content and relative images still display fine in mdview.

Thanks!

[c3er]

Thank you for reporting the problem!

I could reproduce it. Just having a file, e.g. 证据.md and linking to it, is already not working.

This should be fixed with the next release.