In article <mailman.1428.1367972114.3114.python-l...@python.org>, Dave Angel <da...@davea.name> wrote:
> On 05/07/2013 03:58 PM, Andrew Berg 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. > > > > So what you need first is a list of allowable characters for all your > target OS versions. And don't forget that the allowable characters may > vary depending on the particular file system(s) mounted on a given OS. > > You also need to decide how to handle Unicode characters, since they're > different for different OS. In Windows on NTFS, filenames are in > Unicode, while on Unix, filenames are bytes. So on one of those, you > will be encoding/decoding if your code is to be mostly portable. > > Don't forget that ls and rm may not use the same encoding you're using. > So you may not consider it adequate to make the names legal, but you > may also want they easily typeable in the shell. One possible tool that may help you here is unidecode (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unidecode). It doesn't solve your whole problem, but it does help get unicode text into a form which is both 7-bit clean and human readable. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
