markw Posted December 1, 2011 Share Posted December 1, 2011 Wasn't sure where to post this, so its here. I may have been the last person to realize this, so forgive me if this is old news to the rest of you. But in case there are others out there, who like me have little to do with Windows and work mostly with Macs I thought I would pass this on. Like some others here on the forum I use Dropbox for sharing files and folders. Just recently on one particular project we found some files and folders would not sync properly. They would be on Macs and Dropbox's site but not show up on Windows computers. And it turned out the reason was that Windows and Macs have some different ideas as to what is acceptable when naming files and folders. On Macs you can't use a colon in a name, same goes for Windows, I knew of that. But on Windows it goes further and you can't use any of the following either; > (greater than) : (colon) " (double quote) / (forward slash) \ (backslash) | (vertical bar or pipe) ? (question mark) * (asterisk) So Mac users if you are sharing files/folders with Windows users bear this in mind when naming things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fuchur Posted December 2, 2011 Share Posted December 2, 2011 Wasn't sure where to post this, so its here. I may have been the last person to realize this, so forgive me if this is old news to the rest of you. But in case there are others out there, who like me have little to do with Windows and work mostly with Macs I thought I would pass this on. Like some others here on the forum I use Dropbox for sharing files and folders. Just recently on one particular project we found some files and folders would not sync properly. They would be on Macs and Dropbox's site but not show up on Windows computers. And it turned out the reason was that Windows and Macs have some different ideas as to what is acceptable when naming files and folders. On Macs you can't use a colon in a name, same goes for Windows, I knew of that. But on Windows it goes further and you can't use any of the following either; > (greater than) : (colon) " (double quote) / (forward slash) \ (backslash) | (vertical bar or pipe) ? (question mark) * (asterisk) So Mac users if you are sharing files/folders with Windows users bear this in mind when naming things. In general it is always a good idea to never use any kind of special chars at all... [a-zA-Z0-9] or _ - and that's it. In the internet it is although not very clever to use " " (blank-spaces) and so on... Since I am a webdeveloper, I started to use internet-compatible naming-convensions for everything I save... That is the best you can do in my experience... Linux, Mac and Windows-compatibible (even for windows2000 users, etc.) Although there is a character-amount-limit you may run into. Windows 7 is much more loose in this respect, so you can use longer names, but I dont recommend that if you need to transfer things to older systems... In earlier times there was the 8+3-convension (for DOS). 8 characters for the name, 3 characters for the extension... so you dont have to do that nowadays... On windows you can try to rename a file with a not allowed character (like : ) and you will be told which are not allowed by a windows popup. See you *Fuchur* Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted December 2, 2011 Hash Fellow Share Posted December 2, 2011 When I was a boy we were limited to two characters for variable names in our C-64 BASIC... and we liked it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gazzamataz Posted December 2, 2011 Share Posted December 2, 2011 When I was a boy we were limited to two characters for variable names in our C-64 BASIC... and we liked it! Crickey Rob you must be older than me I only remember the 8 characters 3 for the suffix stuff… Mind you I did use a Commodore 64 but that was so long ago I don't even remember what I done on it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gerry Posted December 2, 2011 Share Posted December 2, 2011 What Fuchur said, special characters should be avoided for file naming. Having written Flash Actionscript for several years, I've gotten into the habit of using what they call "camelCase" for naming. And even though it's considered safe to use blank spaces for naming local files on both platforms, that can cause problems for internet use, where browsers insert something like "%20" for blank spaces. Just for consistency, and for easily recognizing file names, camelCase is IMO the best solution. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gerry Posted December 2, 2011 Share Posted December 2, 2011 When I was a boy we were limited to two characters for variable names in our C-64 BASIC... and we liked it! Back around 2000 when I took my 3DS Max course, one of the instructors would affect a geezer's voice and say "When I was a boy we didn't HAVE subsurface scattering!" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted December 2, 2011 Hash Fellow Share Posted December 2, 2011 Obscurely, distantly related... You can't have an extended alphabet character in an XML file I can have "Robert Holmén" as my user name in A:M without trouble but if i want to open an A:M file in an XML viewer the "é" will make it fail. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markw Posted December 2, 2011 Author Share Posted December 2, 2011 As I suspected, this was old news to the rest of you It was the "?" being reserved on Windows that was the biggest surprise to me. "camelCase" you say Gerry. I've not heard of that. Will have to look it up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gerry Posted December 2, 2011 Share Posted December 2, 2011 camelCase is essentially: no spaces, start with a lower case letter, then cap each word after that. It's easy to read and has a nice consistency. Not sure if the name is just slang among Flash coders or is officially what Adobe calls it. EDIT: Well there's a Wikipedia entry for it. They don't specifically mention starting with a lower case letter but the intent is the same. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted December 2, 2011 Hash Fellow Share Posted December 2, 2011 I once saw it called "interCap", but that was by one of those type design people who like to complain about such things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NancyGormezano Posted December 2, 2011 Share Posted December 2, 2011 I've been using this naming convention forever (since the 70's) and never knew it had a name! I was/am one of those lazy typers who finds using the "_" a pain. When I went to the wiki, I confirmed my suspicions as to from whom/where I first picked this convention up. The Smalltalk language, which was developed originally on the Alto and became quite popular in the early 1980s, may have been instrumental in spreading the style outside PARC. Camel case was also used by convention for many names in the PostScript page description language (invented by Adobe Systems founder and ex-PARC scientist John Warnock) John Warnock hired me (as a programmer) to work on the Illiac IV project when it was at NASA Ames. It was there that John was also playing (on the side, on his own time) with the beginnings of Illustrator (because his wife was an artist), as well as Post script, etc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mouseman Posted December 3, 2011 Share Posted December 3, 2011 Obscurely, distantly related... You can't have an extended alphabet character in an XML file I can have "Robert Holmén" as my user name in A:M without trouble but if i want to open an A:M file in an XML viewer the "é" will make it fail. I wonder if it would work if you added this line at the top: (Or other encodings, e.g. UTF-8 or windows-1252) And I wonder if A:M would then still be able to read it in! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fuchur Posted December 3, 2011 Share Posted December 3, 2011 Obscurely, distantly related... You can't have an extended alphabet character in an XML file I can have "Robert Holmén" as my user name in A:M without trouble but if i want to open an A:M file in an XML viewer the "é" will make it fail. I wonder if it would work if you added this line at the top: (Or other encodings, e.g. UTF-8 or windows-1252) And I wonder if A:M would then still be able to read it in! UTF-8 is the best widely spread characterset for the western world and should be used whereever possible. ISO-8859-1 or ISO-885915 (as well as CP-1252) are not able to show all the characters used in western languages properly. But by only inputting another encoding with the XML-tag you will not convert the charset used to save the file in many editors. You have to use an editor which transfers/translates the charsets so that the right character-table-indexes are used. PSPad is one that does that quite well for example but there are others too. Otherwise you will create unknown or just other characters at the places where you would expect them. For example an ISO-8859-1 "ü" (German character spoken more or less like an u and i together) will transfer into an "A^" or something like that. (can't test it right now, but it is something like that. And then A:M would not be able to read it properly, because the new character saved at that point is an "A^" and A:M can't interpret that in the right way. See you *Fuchur* Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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