Making safe file names

[Andrew Berg]

On 2013.05.07 17:37, Jens Thoms Toerring wrote:
> You
> could e.g. replace all characters not allowed by the file
> system by their hexidecimal (ASCII) values, preceeded by a
> '%" (so '/' would be changed to '%2F', and also encode a '%'
> itself in a name by '%25'). Then you have a well-defined
> two-way mapping ("isomorphic" if I remember my math-lear-
> nining days correctly) between the original name and the
> way you store it. E.g.
> 
>   "C/A/T"  would become  "C%2FA%2FT"
> 
> and
> 
>   "C%2FA/T"  would become  "C%252FA%2FT"
> 
> You can translate back and forth between them with not too
> much effort.
> 
> Of course, that assumes that '%' is a character allowed by
> your file system - otherwise pick some other one, any one
> will do in principle. It's a bit harder for a human to in-
> terpret but rathe likely not that much of a problem.
Yes, something like this is what I am trying to achieve. Judging by the responses I've gotten so far, I think I'll have to roll my own
transformation scheme since URL encoding and the like transform Unicode characters. I can memorize that 植松伸夫 is a Japanese composer who
is well-known for his works in the Final Fantasy series of video games. Trying to match up the URL-encoded version to an artist would be
almost impossible when I have several other artist names that have no ASCII characters.

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