Filenames

[Toby Nelson]

I don't believe that native file APIs on any OSes have problems with any characters that are valid to use, and filenames referenced inside LDraw files should not ever be accessible from the command line. Any shell script that wants to parse an LDraw file and pass bits and pieces around already is going to have to deal with spaces in the filenames. And I still feel that these specs aren't an appropriate place to try to enumerate potentially problematic characters when the people using the software to create LDraw files will never read the specs.

Thanks for the clarifications.

By definition if characters are 'valid to use', then they will work. But if you read the link I gave above you will see that there are a number of filing systems under Windows that have invalid characters. These are the characters in question.

I agree that users won't be reading the specs, but tool makers will, and they may find it useful. Tools could warn users about potential cross platform issues when writing or verifying the validity of files for example.

I agree, and also modern filesystems will allow just about anything.

for example I tried this on ext4:

Code:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 roland roland 0 Jan 10 23:57 '   <>:"\?'$'\n''*&#|  '

It's all the 'special' characters mentioned above except the slash, it even has spaces before, after and a new line in it.

Windows has filing systems that are still problematic though right? See the link I gave above for more details on this.

Again, I'm not trying to ban any characters at all. None. They are all valid. The current wording in the specs says that a few special characters "should be avoided", which is not a ban. If it said "must be avoided", that would be an outright ban.

So the question arises: Should the specification document take a position on whether cross platform compatibility and URL compatibility is a good thing at all?
Personally I think it is useful for the reasons I've given. If others think so too, then I'd like to see the list of problem characters extended. It's never going to be a complete solution to cross platform compatibility (since the user can do what they like) but it can't hurt either right?