Pathnames

Non-ASCII characters

The Issue

Non-ASCII characters in the Windows pathnames (foldernames and file names) of music library tracks can cause problems due to incompatiblities with:

• Macintosh
• Portable music players (where they can prevent play of the file and of subsequent files)
• FTP clients and servers (where Unicode characters often appear as a garbage character pairs)
• Some utility programs e.g. FLAC encoder, Beyond Compare 2
• File-sharing programs
• Librarian programs e.g.
  • http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15384&start=15 4290 Fixed Unicode characters in Custom fields cause the field to not be stored in ID3 tags

Workaround

Replace non-ASCII characters with e.g. the nearest ASCII equivalent:

• accented char -> non-accented equivalent
• left and right quotes -> upright quote

Replacement can be performed by Mp3tag using an Action Groups containing a Replace action for each character.

further restrictions

One could also like to avoid urlencoding in urls. Or avoid that case has a meaning.

• restrictions further as ascii could be:
  • prefer usage of only A-Za-z0-9_
    • or only a-z_
  • . for fileextensions, otherwise undecided, probably avoid
  • ' not decided yet, if removed, how to write D'Arienzo?
  • , avoid, at least in work titles
  • []() maybe reserve for special meaning
  • space always replaced with _

work_name_az

There can be lot of discussion whether a title should include ",!?." or such special chars like the spanish leading question mark. There can also be discussion about correct case (upper/lower). The a-z-title is a title that can be derived from lot of different original opinions about correctness. For filenames and references in databases it could be helpfull to have a-z worktitles.

• remove all diacritics
• make all characters lower case
• replace space, comma, dot, with _
• reduce repeating _ to single _

• examples
  • http://eng.tango.info/work:la_maleva - disambiguation page
  • http://eng.tango.info/work:la_viruta - work page - unique match
  • Un jardín de ilusión -> http://eng.tango.info/work:un_jardin_de_ilusion
  • La puñalada -> http://eng.tango.info/work:la_punalada
  • Qué falta que me hacés! -> http://eng.tango.info/work:que_falta_que_me_haces

External references

• Most common non-ASCII 8-bit characters: http://www.microsoft.com/GLOBALDEV/Reference/sbcs/1252.mspx