On Fri, October 14, 2005 8:28 am, Miles Thompson wrote: > One of the "nice" things MSFT did was to allow spaces in directory and > file > names. It created more work for programmers.
I'm not familiar with MSFT... It must be a new acronym for Apple MacOS :-), circa 1984, which (AFAIK) was the first consumer OS to allow human-centric filenames. It was considered a big boon to many users, who were sick and tired of 8.3 at that point. Of course, Unix and Vax and various mainframes allowed all kinds of characters in filenames... Including control-characters, which led to some interesting effects and pranks when crossed with various utilities that did not plan for such characters. But I digress... To some degree, the current filename problem is compounded here by PHP which works under so many different OSes. There's no problem with spaces or apostrophes in Mac filenames or the routines that operate upon them *IF* they are all Mac-based. The only character most humans want to use that is illegal is the colon (:) Similarly, if you stick solely to Windows or Linux, the rules are fairly straight-forward. Well, as straight-forward as anything is in Windows. But once you start writing multi-OS code, you've got : on Mac, / on Linux, \ on Windows, just in the directory separators. Then you start talking about path separaters and shell arguments, and life gets incredibly more complicated. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
