This is weird. I brief search did not help. Has it happened to you that a file in Windows had "/" in it? These files were copied from a Blackberry. Still, Windows should have noticed and replaced the slash with some legitimate character.

Slash!

You can get a / but it has to be Unicode.

Yeah, could be a solidus (fraction slash), which only looks like a slash. From that page: "The solidus can be typed on Microsoft Windows as Alt-8260 and the division slash as Alt-8725."

Although it appears to be lying about that. I couldn't get it to work on a UK keyboard. Charmap has them at U+0002F, U+2044 and U+2215. Pasting them into the BBS edit box results in HTML entities that get escaped and don't display properly.

The former gives me a "D" and the latter gives me a "§"

Works fine for me in Word with the default Calibri font. Doesn't work if I try it elsewhere.

That looks like what happened looking at the difference here:

17/05/2010 - slash
17⁄05⁄2010 - solidus

The preview I see while making this post looks similar to his screenshot, where Windows isn't giving the solidus much room to the point where it's almost touching the numbers.

(For Mac users, it's Option-Shift-1.)

If it is a solidus, thats a pretty clever trick. The OS X Finder does something different to enable forward slashes (for compatibility with the classic Mac OS). In the GUI, a / can appear in a file, but under the hood on the Unix side, it's translated to a : . Makes me wonder how it does the translation though if it were to be copied into OS 9, as : is the folder separator in that OS. OS X Finder still bans : from being manually entered in a file name.

*edit, hrm, the BBS blew it up when even I posted. Lets try the admin cheat of HTML post mode*

Tom, you're right, I did not notice that!


The former does give me a solidus at the command prompt, but I can't seem to use it into a filename (trying with an "echo >" command). It seems the command prompt treats it as a slash...

OK, on another PC, my desktop, I am getting exactly the same as you, Dignan. Should't Unicode be one for all? I'll go and check what is different between my laptop and my PC...

What Unicode though? 8bit or 16bit?

Not quite. Whether the font used is Unicode and whether it has all the glyphs is important.

This actually bit me at work recently. I ran a command in powershell, and redirected the output to create a text file. On windows, looked fine. On OS X, looked fine. Sent it off to a Gentoo Linux box, and things barfed, as it claimed it was a binary file. Looked deeper, and Powershell created a UTF-16 file, with a BOM marker, set to little endian. The Gentoo box didn't like it.

First CR/LF nightmares, and now UTF madness. For basic "text". ugg.

WIth a BOM? Surprising it didn't work. It's files without a BOM that a lot of program will barf at. Though I suppose if the program is non-unicode then it's going to go to crap no matter what.

Linux itself doesn't have any notion of the contents of a file. What program barfed?

Most of the common command line tools did, like less. Same ones were happy on OS X. Being Gentoo, something was likely not compiled in somewhere. Not a big deal, as the way Powershell saved it was also doubling the size, so fixing the issue there was more useful then trying to get Gentoo to be happy with UTF-16 LE.