special characters in system filenames

[Art]

hey, i think this must be really easy:

i want to use strings as filenames that include characters that are
not allowed in windows filenames. is there a special converter method
for this? something like HttpUtility.UrlEncode(...) for Urls.

if not, what characters do i have to replace? is there an encoding
that is valid? i could create a byte[] from the utf8-string and encode
it into a <whatever encoding is valid for windows filenames>-string.

thanks in advance,
art

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

Art wrote:

i want to use strings as filenames that include characters that are
not allowed in windows filenames. is there a special converter method
for this? something like HttpUtility.UrlEncode(...) for Urls.

if not, what characters do i have to replace? is there an encoding
that is valid? i could create a byte[] from the utf8-string and encode
it into a <whatever encoding is valid for windows filenames>-string.

I am not aware of anything particular.

You can make something up.

One suggestion:

public static string SafeName(string fnm)
{
string res = fnm;
MatchCollection reg = Regex.Matches(res, @"[^A-Za-z0-9-_\.]");
for(int i = 0; i < reg.Count; i++) {
res = res.Replace(reg[i].Groups[0].Value, "__" +
((int)reg[i].Groups[0].Value[0]).ToString("X2"));
}
return res;
}

Arne

[Peter Macej]

If the file name doesn't have to be human readable, you can use base64
encoding. It's one line solution, just use Convert.ToBase64String method.

--
Peter Macej
Helixoft - http://www.helixoft.com
VSdocman - Commenter and generator of class documentation for C#, VB
..NET and ASP .NET code