Is it safe to use tar even if there are some characters other than ASCII printable characters?
For example, Japanese characters, Chinese characters, newline character etc.
Are there any known problems that might make tarball extraction fail if using special characters?
You can of course read the source of tar to check for yourself.
Simply put, tar does no interpretation of the byte sequence that make up a filename. Just like the kernel, it treats it as an abstract sequence of bytes. So it is 'safe', in the sense that usable files will be extracted.
In the environment where the files are unpacked, then user tools may interpret the filenames as different characters; that's always an issue with changing locales, and not specific to the transport (tar, NFS, FTP, ...).
tar- which does not encode anything but sparse files - but a POSIXtar/paxwill encode files as UTF-8 or not at all and record its type as BINARY. And a POSIXtar/paxdoes allow for changing a charset, anyway.tarthat's all - @Sys' answer covered the POSIX option. The OP has tagged this aslinuxand the CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 boxes I run both showtar --show-defaultsstill as--format=gnu, therefore there is a very good chance that the OP will be usingtarin GNU mode by default. Thanks for mentioningpaxby the way - never really looked at it before :-) Time for some reading...paxsoon - the features listed here are really friggin cool - but I've yet to actually find apaxthat supports them - or all of them - especially the-o listop=.... The closest I've come, actually, is GNUtarand modified headers with--format=posix --pax-option=...- but still notlistop... sigh. The POSIXpaxdescription is among the best - reading it was enough for me to do this.