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File Names : what should be avoided

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mouser:
do not use spaces in filenames or folder names.  legal in many cases but can be a pain to work with in some programs.

Armando:
Everybody : thank you for your input.


@Eóin : an informative and interesting read. Thanks a lot for the link!

@mouser : it’s interesting you mention the “space” character since the “Path Name Portability Guide” omits to  mention it. I wonder why. edit : actually, the space is clearly not mentionned in the allowed characters... For a good reason.

@Ehtyar : are you suggesting that I shouldn’t worry about the "." character in files and folders names ?


Wow. I find it interesting, to say the least, that Windows allows all kinds of characters that could eventually cause problems (or could they?). Shouldn't there be some kind of message each time one uses “unorthodox” characters??? (I know there's already a partially complete message -- which is better than none, I guess. Linux will not say a word, except for the /, I think. Mac OS X never says a thing, if I remember well.)

Anyway. Since there are soooo many files to rename in one’s computer, I'm just wondering : is it worth the effort? (I'm sweating just thinking of all the work involved in changing all my pdf, doc, rtf, txt, etc. file names.)

Which leads me to the following questions :


Q1- In your opinion, what are the specific contexts one would run into problems and What kind of specific problem one might run into if :

1) one uses special characters like é à è â, etc. (I mean : what do Germans, Norwegians, Chinese, Japanese, etc. -- all non-English speakers -- do?) ?

2) one uses periods, commas, spaces and hyphens?


Q2- Would these problems be relatively easily solvable? (Ahem : is it worth it to break the rules...??)

Q3- AND… What are your file and folder naming habits like? :)



(If you think I should break this post in multiple threads, please tell me… I actually have more questions, but I'll wait...)

Armando:
I know it's not exactly the same subject, but, hey, it talks about characters... A pretty good article, i believe, on character encodings and characters sets :

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Armando:
Not as rigorous, in some ways, but interesting nevertheless.

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2005/11/17/maximizing-filesystem-portability

I wonder about the Upper case / Lower case differences in file names (can be valuable when you're removing spaces), and if they're preserved from one fs to another... But I'll let you guys digest a bit before I start again.  :-[

Eóin:
It seems like the humble underscore '_' is the only portable way of putting name separators in files. Which is a pity because it's not as nice, aesthetically, as CamelCase, period '.', hyphen '-' or a good old space. At least not to my eyes.

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