an0malaus posted at 6:35AM Fri, 16 August 2019 - #4359566

This raises a point I'd like people's opinion on. Are we really stuck with so many prohibited characters in file names these days? As far as current operating systems go, and support for, at the very least, European languages with diacritical marks on characters, why are there still prohibitions on certain characters? Apart from the obvious ones like path separators (/:), drive letter and extension delimiters (:.) across the OSs Poser supports (perhaps Linux, too, in a century or three), why do we still have archaic restrictions like 32 character file names, when the underlying operating systems no longer have such limits.

Unicode largely eliminated most of the bugaboos, but some chars are still used to get an intepreter or compiler's attention (example: the apostrophe (" ' ") is still used as an escape character in Powershell, bash, csh, ksh, tcsh; as a string delimiter in Python, Ruby, loads of other scripting languages, etc.) This means it's going to be prohibited for use as a filename or a directory name. Just the way it is - nothing to do with a 32-bit character limitation, but everything to do with how an OS, shell, script, or even lower-level code will interpret such characters as the interpreter comes across it.

Fun part is, you can escape the apostrophe and it will literally print just fine. Problem is, you, and everyone else who comes across, calls, or handles it would have to also remember to properly escape that symbol - under every circumstance, and every time, without fail.

As far as in a .cr2 file? lhomme works just fine, because nobody will ever see it. Marketing material can use apostrophes all day long. Overall, I see very little problem here... just a tiny bit of accommodation in the filenames and internal object descriptors.