H.S. wrote:
Regarding this problem of valid characters in filename, I have always
discourages uses from using spaces in their filename. I think all of the
present OSes handle those perfectly well, but one cannot be sure if an
application will do so or not; that depends on the programmer who built
that application.
I recommend the rule of thumb: use alpha-numeric characters only (a-z,
0-9) and perhaps an underscore to separate words in the filename, and
additionally a period for the extension. How hard can this be?
Would you recommend this to a ordinary Joe who just happens to be
Chinese and mostly uses Chinese?
Are not Chinese, and Gujarati, and even French and German normal languages?
I agree with you about avoiding spaces and being careful, and testing
anything you are doing that seems unusual, but one has little reason any
more to be careful about perfectly normal characters in one’s language,
if that language happens not to be English, and characters like “é” or
“ö” are even “þ” or “ŵ” or “ŋ” or “ħ” are used.
Since colon is normally forbidden, I tend to use the central dot
character “·” between digits in time strings, that is, for example, to
indicate that a file was created on September 16, 2008, at 14:22 by
including “2008-08-16_14·22” in the name.
Using basic common sense precautions prevents huge headaches later on.
Yes.
Coming back to your point of making the application warn the user, well
that depends totally on the programmer. And if you ask me, trying to
force programmers to do this is fighting a losing battle. Programmers
are not known to follow best practices rigorously. In short, one just
cannot replace users' common sense with programming best practices.
But in this case the application did warn the user. But the user did not
understand the warning. This applied to programmers also, when they
stumble across an error message. One of the last things even experienced
programmers often do is attempt to read and understand the error message.
Jim Allan
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