Valid filenames in windows

At least it can still be renamed. So the names are also invalid if followed by an extension. Sometimes it tends to disappear unexpectedly, but it comes back and the files in it are also still there. Strange things anyway. For example, AUX. Tested on Windows 7 by renaming files in Explorer. That bit me when trying to look at some Linux source on a Windows box recently. Pretty annoying. Your email address will not be published.

But Windows supports more-thanbit characters. Wikipedia states , that for example the. Therefore, I want to present a much more liberal approach using Unicode Homoglyph characters to replace the "illegal" ones. I found the result in my comparable use-case by far more readable. Plus you can even restore the original content from the replacements.

To keep things organized, I will always give the character, it's name and the hexadecimal number representation. If available, I'll try to point to more info or alternatives - feel free to show me more or better ones. Instead of. The colon itself is not permitted Also the box drawing characters contain various other options. For additional ideas, you can also look for example into this block. You still want more ideas? You can try to draw your desired character and look at the suggestions here.

To get its information, you can always search for this character on a suited platform such as the Unicode Lookup add 0x when you search for hex or this Unicode Table that only allows to search for the name, in this case "Tifinagh Letter Yan". With this knowledge, you have several options to produce these special characters including the use of.

In Windows 10 , the following characters are forbidden by an error when you try to type them:. Here's a c implementation for windows based on Christopher Oezbek's answer.

NET Framework System. IO provides the following functions for invalid file system characters:. Those functions should return appropriate results depending on the platform the. NET runtime is running in. That said, the Remarks in the documentation pages for those functions say:. The array returned from this method is not guaranteed to contain the complete set of characters that are invalid in file and directory names.

The full set of invalid characters can vary by file system. I always assumed that banned characters in Windows filenames meant that all exotic characters would also be outlawed. The inability to use? One day I discovered that it was virtually only those chars which were banned. Other Unicode characters may be used. Now I form the filename in Word, using the substitute chars, and copy it to the Windows filename. So far I have had no problems. The best suggestion I could come up with was to let the user name the file however he likes.

Using an error handler when the application tries to save the file, catch any exceptions, assume the filename is to blame obviously after making sure the save path was ok as well , and prompt the user for a new file name. For best results, place this checking procedure within a loop that continues until either the user gets it right or gives up.

Worked best for me at least in VBA. When creating internet shortcuts in Windows, to create the file name, it skips illegal characters, except for forward slash, which is converted to minus. In Unix shells, you can quote almost every character in single quotes '. Accessing the single quote itself from within a quoted string is possible, because you can concatenate strings with single and double quotes, like 'I'"'"'m' which can be used to access a file called "I'm" double quote also possible here.

So you should avoid all control characters, because they are too difficult to enter in the shell. The rest still is funny, especially files starting with a dash, because most commands read those as options unless you have two dashes -- before, or you specify them with. If you want to be nice, don't use any of the characters the shell and typical commands use as syntactical elements, sometimes position dependent, so e.

When you are mean, your file names are VT escape sequences ;- , so that an ls garbles the output. I had the same need and was looking for recommendation or standard references and came across this thread. My current blacklist of characters that should be avoided in file and directory names are:.

How are we doing? Please help us improve Stack Overflow. Take our short survey. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. What characters are forbidden in Windows and Linux directory names? Ask Question. Asked 12 years ago.

Active 3 days ago. Viewed k times. Fred Gandt 3, 1 1 gold badge 31 31 silver badges 39 39 bronze badges. Jeff Jeff Sorry, something went wrong. Also, I'm not super confident in my PHP knowledge, but I think you'll need to double-escape the backslash: once because PHP treats it as an escape character in the string literal even when using single quotes , and a second time for the regex engine.

It looks like C uses the prefix to denote verbatim strings , which look like Python's raw strings , and should only need a single escape for the regex engine. JS does not yet seem to offer unescaped string literals, but RegExp literals don't apply the additional layer of escaping. The URL is old. IndexOfAny Path. For Python3: import re re. Skip to content. Sign in Sign up. I'm actually looking for a complete table that lists all allowed and disallowed characters.

That's not so vague in its content. Even if all the OSs you care about allow characters in the filename, you might have been better off allowing only "portable" characters, for some such other reason that you haven't considered yet. VladimirKornea the question states "depending on the operating system" and not URLs. Show 10 more comments. Also, no space character at the start or end, and no period at the end.

This is not correct. Windows doesn't allow backslash and some strings e. See this answer for more characters that Windows does not allow. Devid Devid 1, 4 4 gold badges 23 23 silver badges 45 45 bronze badges. Add a comment. WebDevBooster Here is the code to clean file name in python. Length of file name is beyond of scope. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook.