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in reply to Re^4: OS X troubleshooting help needed - parse filename & open file
in thread OS X troubleshooting help needed - parse filename & open file

So, you want to distribute your program across multiple platforms but don't care whether it works there or not? Why are you asking at all then?

Note that about every OS (respectively filesytem) nowadays allows "accented characters", and many filesystems have allowed whitespace in filenames and directories a long time.

It seems to me that you don't have much experience with users, as users like to put whitespace in their filenames and also like to write names as they are properly written instead of asciifying them. It depends on you whether you want to educate your users about how to properly name their files and directories or whether you want your program to just work with what they throw at it.

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Re^6: OS X troubleshooting help needed - parse filename & open file
by elef (Friar) on Oct 17, 2010 at 20:11 UTC
    So, you want to distribute your program across multiple platforms but don't care whether it works there or not?

    Not quite, I would like it to work everywhere for everyone. But if the user does really unreasonable things and it would take an inordinate amount of effort for me to correct what I consider to be the user's error, well, I leave them with an error message that will hopefully tell them what went wrong. There's also a readme that tells them they shouldn't have done it in the first place. It's not my fault if they didn't read it.

    It depends on you whether you want to educate your users about how to properly name their files and directories or whether you want your program to just work with what they throw at it. Precisely, and in some cases, I do choose the first option. As you can see in the other thread, a bunch of monks failed to come up with a solution for the non-ascii problem in a week of brainstorming, so I called it quits. In the time it would take to sort that mess out (if I ever managed to sort it out at all, which is doubtful), I could probably introduce 5 to 10 other meaningful features instead.
    As I said, I don't get paid to do this, so I can afford to ignore really egregious fringe cases.
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Re^6: OS X troubleshooting help needed - parse filename & open file
by elef (Friar) on Oct 17, 2010 at 20:21 UTC
    Note: non-ascii characters have indeed been widespread for a long time, but here's an example: if you get a bunch of attached files in Yahoo mail and choose a bulk download, yahoo zips them up for you. Then you unzip the file and find that the non-ascii characters have been corrupted.
    Yahoo is probably the second or third biggest email provider in the world and they don't support non-ascii characters... I think I can get away with doing the same in my hobby project, even though I did attempt to one-up them.

    Spaces are less of an issue. I personally think it's not a good idea to use spaces in a filename, but they don't seem to cause a problem in the aligner.
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