Making safe file names

[Dan Stromberg]

On 5/7/13, Andrew Berg <bahamutzero8825 at gmail.com> 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.

You might consider:
http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/svn/backshift/trunk/escape_mod.py
http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/svn/backshift/trunk/test-escape_mod

It doubles the length of the string, but it produces safe, easily
readable escaped strings - which tends to make debugging easier.

It requires a couple of other modules (easily obtained from the same
SVN repo) though.