Replacing illegal characters in folder and file names?

[JimR]

When I posted a few weeks ago concerning problems regarding my Roberts iStream radio accessing MinimServer I was advised that the problem probably lay with ‘illegal’ characters in some of my folder and file names.

In an attempt to fix this I am planning to run a script this weekend that will munch through the file system renaming anything that has ‘dodgy’ characters. My script specifies a list of acceptable characters and, in each folder or filename it encounters, replaces any characters not on this list with a placeholder – currently an ‘x’. I am not overly concerned about any loss of intelligibility – the tags inside the files will not be altered.

I will back up everything twice first!

Is this a good plan? What characters are guaranteed to be legal across all uPnP/DLNA servers, control points and renderers? Is this documented somewhere?

All advice gratefully received.

Jim

[bbrip]

Well, from my experience its dots, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, quotation marks, double points, semicolons, "Umlaute" (ä,ü,ö etc..) and even spaces that might cause issues to some particulary "dumb" control point.

If you want to be sure to get it to work, you may have to avoid all of those - or dump / send back that piece of equipment until the manufacturer has fixed it, which is what I would do there must be better toys than this Roberts radio (which I've never used or heard of before) if it causes so many issues...

[simoncn]

(28-02-2013 09:18)JimR Wrote:  When I posted a few weeks ago concerning problems regarding my Roberts iStream radio accessing MinimServer I was advised that the problem probably lay with ‘illegal’ characters in some of my folder and file names.

In an attempt to fix this I am planning to run a script this weekend that will munch through the file system renaming anything that has ‘dodgy’ characters. My script specifies a list of acceptable characters and, in each folder or filename it encounters, replaces any characters not on this list with a placeholder – currently an ‘x’. I am not overly concerned about any loss of intelligibility – the tags inside the files will not be altered.

I will back up everything twice first!

Is this a good plan? What characters are guaranteed to be legal across all uPnP/DLNA servers, control points and renderers? Is this documented somewhere?

All advice gratefully received.

Jim

I sent you a PM last week with a pointer to a test build of MinimServer that should fix this problem for you. Did you receive my message?

[JimR]

Quote:I sent you a PM last week with a pointer to a test build of MinimServer that should fix this problem for you. Did you receive my message

I have now! Many thanks. Will let you know how I get on.