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Request for option to convert forbidden characters in file names (6 posts)
- Started 20 years ago by Golgoth
- Latest reply 20 years ago from Golgoth
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Golgoth Member
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Jim Matthews Administrator
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure how we'd do that conversion bi-directionally -- we would need to find a bunch of characters that are legal on Windows but rarely or never used on the Mac. But we could certainly do a one-way translation to keep transfers from failing.
Thanks,
Jim Matthews
Fetch Softworks -
Golgoth Member
Two-way is much better (backup/restore!), and quite possible I believe: all you need is 9 character codes (there are in fact 9 forbidden chars /:*?"<>| ) which are unused BOTH in ISO 8859-1 AND in the standard Mac-Iso conversion that you already use and describe in an accompanying file. It seems to me that char codes 14 to 22 (decimal) for example might do the trick, cf http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/EXPORT/www/ISO-8859-1-Encoding.html . First you would have to check that these character codes are allowed in Windows file names of course. An even better option would be to let the user choose the 9 characters or character codes (eg for one-way use one might prefer converting a date's "/" into a "-" than into a meaningless rectangle), and choose either "no conversion" or one-way or bi-directional. And for uses other than Windows the set of forbidden characters could also be customizable.
Just my 2 cts but I really would appreciate such a feature and I guess I am not the only one! -
Golgoth Member
Oops sorry for repeating myself, but my msgs didnt show up on the forum so I resubmitted several times.
And as message deletion by its author seems to be disabled, could you please delete all my msgs starting from the 11-05 9:31 one? And also if possible please register me for email notification on this thread, I forgot to do it when I started it, sorry.
Thanks,
Michel -
Jim Matthews Administrator
I've deleted the messages. I don't see a way to let users delete their own messages (but it should be possible to edit a message, so you could delete all the text). And apparently there's no way to register you for email notification after the fact, so I hope you'll check in for this reply :).
Thanks for the detailed follow-up; I will add it to our bug/suggestion database.
Thanks,
Jim Matthews
Fetch Softworks -
Golgoth Member
Thank you Jim. Two more cents:
My initial suggestion of char codes 14 to 22 doesnt work actually, I have tried. Windows names seem to be based on the ANSI char set http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/demos/ansi.html which doesn't seem to allow char codes below 31.
However there are exactly 6 unused char codes in ANSI which might come handy: 127, 129, 141, 143, 144, 157. They should all be legal in Windows names. I have checked by copy/paste renaming (using a text file edited with EdHex) for the first two 127 and 129 on Windows XP, no pb they show up as rectangles in Explorer but they are allowed.
Other char codes which could be useful for this two-way name conversion purpose are the ANSI characters which are not used in MacRoman cf http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/demos/charsetdiffs.html#b : instead of converting them to arbitrary chars as currently done, at least for some of them one might as well use, on the Mac side, characters which are illegal in Windows names.
Of course name conversion can't and mustn't follow the same rules as contents conversion, where a "/" has got to translate as a "/" !
Good luck,
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Michel
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I must say I quite appreciate fETCH's ISO 8859-1 bidirectional conversion feature, which allows accentuated characters in file names and text files to transparently look the same on the Mac and on Windows, but concerning Macintosh file names an option to bidirectionally convert Windows-forbidden characters / * ? " < > is cruelly missing IMHO. This would allow transparent exchange with and backup to the Windows platform wouldn't it?
Posted 20 years ago #