kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 11:20:28AM -0400, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> make sure your file names are valid on all platforms.  I think there are
> a few characters that are valid on *nix that are not valid on windows.

This is the authoritative source:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/177506

The POSIX rule instead is "any octet except NUL and slash". Of course
pain *will* occur when applying strange names... also IIRC there are
more limitations when 'extended' character are in use (and folders don't
scale well to thousands of files).

I'd also exclude the RFC3986 reserved characters, for obvious reasons.

IMHO it's best to stick to some conservative set, like alphanumerics and
a couple of symbols like - and maybe _. Add . and ~ and you have the
RFC3986 unreserved character set, neat. Do we really need spaces and
quotes and whatever in a symbol name?

Then one user will want to name is footprint "Thæt Fòótprint previously
known as "\_/" :)" and maybe with a cow picture inside. What will we
do?

We either:
1) apply robust quoting rules in whatever context they are used (sexp,
   URI, whatever). The current sexp rule is (very) inconvenient to parse but at
   least is robust. URI encoding is probably readily available in some
   other library.

or

2) restrict to a 'safe' set and enforcing it on the input

also... will it be case sensitive/insensitive/preserving?

Just decide and implement as decided.

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl