Making safe file names

[MRAB]

On 07/05/2013 20:58, Andrew Berg wrote:
> Currently, I keep Last.fm artist data caches to avoid unnecessary API calls and have been naming the files using the artist name. However,
> artist names can have characters that are not allowed in file names for most file systems (e.g., C/A/T has forward slashes). Are there any
> recommended strategies for naming such files while avoiding conflicts (I wouldn't want to run into problems for an artist named C-A-T or
> CAT, for example)? I'd like to make the files easily identifiable, and there really are no limits on what characters can be in an artist name.
>
Conflicts won't occur if:

1. All of the characters of the artist's name are mapped to an encoding.

2. Different characters map to different encodings.

3. No encoding is a prefix of another encoding.

In practice, you'll be mapping most characters to themselves.