in reply to Removing Bad Characters from a String

In Unix, there are no "bad characters", except that NUL is interpreted as end-of-string, and "/" is reserved for a directory separator. What precisely are you asking about?

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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Re^2: Removing Bad Characters from a String
by mrborisguy (Hermit) on May 09, 2005 at 01:30 UTC
    unless this is a windows machine, in which case there are more 'bad characters'

    From a windows error message:

    A filename cannot contain any of the following characters:
    / : * ? " < > |
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      That's the list for NTFS, in FAT, more characters are banned. On the top of my head, I think the additional ones are \x20 + = [ ] %

      I think that control characters (\x00-\x1f but not \x7f IIRC) and backslash (\\) are also banned in filenames, despite that error message not mentioning them.

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        actually, i'm not sure about your assertion that those additional characters are banned in FAT. i'm running on my parents' win 98 machine, which has a FAT filesystem (i first assumed, but then i checked, and it is FAT). i successfully named a file 'a[0] += 7 % 3.txt'. this is also the OS i got my error message from.
        i'd upload a small image as proof, but i'm not really sure how.
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        LOL and ++ from me, but it's weird hearing this from one of the co-authors of Learning Perl on Win32 Systems...

        Flavio (perl -e 'print(scalar(reverse("\nti.xittelop\@oivalf")))')

        Don't fool yourself.
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