[nialo]

I work on another music file management system, my personal special hell is playlist files. An m3u playlist file is just a new-line separated list of file paths, which can be relative or absolute, and potentially encoded in whatever locale is set on the users computer. Some fun issues:

* Windows and Mac filesystems are generally case-insensitive, so some users will have the file names in the playlist file in one case and the actual file names on disk in another format * Sometimes file paths cross between two different filesystems, because one is mounted in the other with a USB drive or over CIFS or similar. Sometimes these two different filesystems have different case sensitivities * There's no way to know how the playlist file was encoded * HFS+ normalizes file paths to Unicode NFD, but there's no guarantee that the paths in a playlist file will be normalized. Also, sometimes users generate an m3u file on a Windows system and expect it to just work on a Mac. Also, the filesystem nesting problem with network or USB mounts can happen this way too.

[creeble]

Sounds a lot like my life a couple of years ago (and intermittently since). I don't get the bug reports any more because I think customer service has learned that file name problems can be fixed by renaming the files. Not fun for the user, but a sure fix.

Ya know what kind of file names work virtually everywhere? ASCII ones.

[JdeBP]

This is a mis-use of ASCII. After all, the colon, asterisk, forward slash, question mark, backward slash, and NUL characters are all in ASCII, yet they are far from things that "work virtually everywhere". And that isn't even considering the open and close square bracket and semi-colon characters which are also not anywhere near portable to the extent of "working virtually everywhere".

The kind of file names that do work "virtually everywhere" are not ASCII, but rather are those who only use characters from the POSIX Portable Filename Character Set, which at 65 characters is just over half the size of ASCII (which has 128 characters).

* http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...