Underscores vs. spaces in RDF file names

speaker.guy · Post by **speaker.guy** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 10:47 am

Fot those of you who have not been regularly following this, the underscores in the rdf title must be replaced by spaces before it will be recognized by RM.

Capn Trips · Post by **Capn Trips** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 11:01 am

speaker.guy wrote:Fot those of you who have not been regularly following this, the underscores in the rdf title must be replaced by spaces before it will be recognized by RM.

As I understand it, that's not PRECISELY true.

RM will recognize and use the rdf fine, but the NAME of the rdf that is displayed in RM's drop-down list will be messed up (a fragment of the proper name, or SEVERAL such fragments scattered about the entire list) and therefore you may not be able to find (or recognize) it in that alphabetized list.

Perhaps a fine distinction, but a distinction nonetheless.

Although if you can't find it, you can't use it, so the net result is the same.

gfb107 · Post by **gfb107** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 11:15 am

Seems to me this IE behavior of replacing spaces with underscores is reason enough to switch to Firefox or Opera.

Some RDFs actually have underscores in their names, so you can't blindly change all underscores to spaces when you run into this problem.

speaker.guy · Post by **speaker.guy** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 11:49 am

I personally have a lot of stuff going that won't run under Firefox. Seems a little like the tail wagging the dog....

gfb107 · Post by **gfb107** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 1:19 pm

Interesting. I don't have any sites that work better in IE than Firefox.

speaker.guy · Post by **speaker.guy** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 1:23 pm

It is not "work better", it is "don't work at all"! And I confess, at the moment I can't remember which ones. I only know when I am on a Firefox computer, they don't come up, and I sign into IE and they work fine. A couple of years ago, I tried Firefox at home, sites didn't work, and I deleted it.

Post by **ElizabethD** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 8:33 pm

As Greg said, Opera loads this file with the spaces intact.
So I tried it using IE.
IE6 loads this file with the spaces intact - Windows 2000 Pro.
IE7 mangles the filename - Windows XP.

Some websites don't comply with the standard. So FF or Opera may indeed fail. Opera FAQ suggest to tell them of problem sites so they can help make the sites work better, or we can pretend it's IE by masking.

If the site is ok, and still have problems, most likely it's some default settings of the 'block everything that might bite' nature. Opera can, and I'm sure FF can as well, keep very tight global settings, but relax them on a site by site basis.

Post by **The Robman** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 10:08 pm

The funny thing is, when I download RDFs at home I getthe underscores, but when I download them at work I get spaces. Both machines are running WinXP and MSIE. I have MSIE7 at home, but I'm not sure which version is at work.

Capn Trips · Post by **Capn Trips** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 12:39 am

It appears that the replacement of spaces with underscores is done only to the filename of any uploaded file itself, but not files contained therein. I just downloaded the rdf.zip file and IT downloaded as:
RDFs_for_IR_and_RM_Version_1.27.zip

Whilst the individual rdf files contained therein retained spaces.

Having said that, SEVERAL of the included rdf files have unnecessary/incorrect underscores, no doubt due to being downloaded by Nils individually before he added them to the zip file, so for example, returning focus to the Atlas rdfs, the 10251025 and 30003000 rdfs are correct within the zip file, but the 30333033 rdf has the extra underscores. Other such misnamed rdfs include:
10231023, 10261026; 10331033; 10481048; 10621062.

These names should be corrected in the rdf.zip distribution for the next update.

Post by **ElizabethD** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 8:30 am

I think it's a pretty serious issue as it affects all non-zip files in the file section.

binky123 · Post by **binky123** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 5:18 pm

WinXP IE6 doesn't replace spaces with underscores but adds a [1] in front of the dot in 'JP1.3'.

Post by **The Robman** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 6:11 pm

binky123 wrote:WinXP IE6 doesn't replace spaces with underscores but adds a [1] in front of the dot in 'JP1.3'.

Yes, I get that alot, not just with RDFs but with any file that has more than one dot in the name.

Post by **ElizabethD** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:06 pm

binky123: so that's what those [1] things are. I always wondered

Rob, Perhaps there's a way in a forum script that's used to transfer files to force quotes around the filenames if they contain spaces. if there is we could try on a file or two with different systems and browsers.

Post by **The Robman** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:11 pm

It might be possible, but I don't know when I'll have the chance to look into it. If and when I get the time, my next web project is to move this site over to GoDaddy, I've already moved rockabilly.net and GetSmartMusic.com over there, but the problem here is the forum. While I'm doing the move, I might as well upgrade to the latest version of phpbb and the latest version of pafiledb (the file section) but even once I've got the database copied and converted and all that stuff, I'll then have to re-apply all the mods that are here. Most are official mods, so they shouldn't be too hard, but I did something to fix a bug in the file section code a few years ago and I'll be damned if I can remember what I did!