IFS=$'\n'

You complain about ASCII filenames but a few of the examples are obviously Unicode, namely using emoji, well outside of the ASCII character set. But since you've brought up Unicode file names, let me introduce you to bidirectional text!

If you use Hebrew or Arabic, some of your directories or files will have right-to-left text in them. This is a recipe for disaster.

If in English you'd have "C:\Users\Adam\Documents\Research\Paper.pdf", which breaks down to:

C:\
Users\
Adam\
Documents\
Research\
Paper.pdf

In Hebrew you'd have: "C:\משתמשים\אדם\מסמכים\מחקר\מאמר.pdf", which breaks down to:

C:\
משתמשים\
אדם\
מסמכים\
מחקר\
מאמר.pdf

The entire path goes backwards, and the ".pdf" extension is visually attached to the "Users" folder if the text is rendered naively. It's insane. Fortunately many GUI shells nowadays separate each path item so they can't get intermixed like this. Example:

But still, if you copy a path into plaintext, it will still visually look wrong, and there is literally nothing that anyone can do about it. This is the correct way to render this text.

Exact same issues occur in Arabic and the few other RTL languages usedin the world. It's a massive pain.

Edit: oh, and on commandline on Windows, the required characters aren't even available by default so you get this lovely thing

Why not use
ꟻbq.משתמשים/אדם/מסמכים/מחקר/מאמר/:ↄ
instead? If you want to write from right to left, you should go all the way.
- You maniac!
Excuse me, officer- this guy right here
this meme was fueled by sleep deprivation, alcohol, and caffeine. any views implied or expressed are not to be taken seriously and may result in side effects such as nausea and vomiting
The way this should work is it's set as either left-to-right or right-to-left. (C:)/1/2/3.ext or ext.3/2/1/(:C). It shouldn't render part of it one direction and part of it the other direction logically. It's probably impossible to fix at this point, but this makes a lot more sense.
- Yeah, that is pretty much how it works in some GUIs like in the screenshot, where each slash is replaced by >. But if you represent the path in a string, and put that string in some context that doesn't know it's a path and that it should be rendered by some special rules, then it'll just be subject to the usual Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UBA).
  The UBA is a masterpiece, and I'm not being sarcastic. For everyday text with mixed directionality, such as a WhatsApp chat in Arabic/Hebrew with a bit of English or just some numbers mixed in, the UBA's default output is the ideal way to order the characters.
  The problem is, special cases (such as file paths) just can't be covered by a universal algorithm. You can insert special characters into the path, namely FSI and PDI ("First Strong directional Isolate" and "Pop Directional Isolate") to make the text render the way you want under the UBA... But then, when you copy that path, the special characters would still be there so software would consider them part of the path, and then of course, File Not Found.
- (:-C) boah or (C:) nose?
Crazy... Btw, how does this work for top-to-bottom languages?
- I'm not sure, as I've never used them. But I imagine this is a lot more straightforward.
  The problem with bidirectional text is that it's bi-directional. Parts of it are RTL and parts are LTR. The main problem is how to order the characters visually, assuming that they are stored in memory in the order in which they are intended to be read.
  For text that goes in only one direction this is trivial. LTR: characters are arranged from left to right. RTL: characters are arranged from right to left. Easy peasy!
  The problem, as I've said, is when you have a sentence or paragraph with both LTR and RTL text inside it. Then the algorithm is needed.
  To my knowledge, there is no bottom-to-top language, and certainly not one that would be mixed in within top-to-bottom text or vice versa. So an algorithm isn't necessary: if TTB (top-to-bottom) is used, characters simply need to be arranged top to bottom.
  To add on to this, I believe TTB text is only used explicitly. By default, all text is rendered horizontally (usually LTR) unless you explicitly set the software to render it top-to-bottom. So if you just have plain text in Japanese or whatever language with no additional markup, it will be rendered horizontally and subject to the UBA.
- I'm pretty sure you can't do that in windows, but i have https://president.mn/mng for you, that's pretty cool
- They usually have a ltr or rtl version of it.
How would it look if you intermingled Hebrew and English in the path? E.g. C:\English\Hebrew\Hebrew\English\Hebrew
- I'm most cases, a consecutive run of RTL or neutral characters would be rendered RTL, while the rest would be rendered LTR. However, if it's within a RTL paragraph, this would be reversed.
  For example, the following two paragraphs have the same path, but the surrounding text is translated:
  Open C:\Users\אדם\Documents\דברים\מסמך.pdf and click "Sign".
  פתח את C:\Users\אדם\Documents\דברים\מסמך.pdf ולחץ על "חתימה".
  Depending on your client, these should be rendered differently. If they don't, click here to see it: https://jsfiddle.net/jex3yfrw/
  Edit: looks like Voyager needs a bug report! The web Lemmy seems to render it RTL (correctly) but still left-aligned which is not ideal.
Make it vertical? ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Fun fact: C:\: is a perfectly valid NTFS path. Windows won't let you create it, though, because Windows doesn't even fully support the NTFS specification. That's why you have to specify the windows_names option when mounting an NTFS filesystem on Linux.

Me: slowly reaches for loaded weapon*
Me: You best just keep on drivin’
TIL. Thanks!

The creator of this meme does not know what ASCII is

- Welp, it's not a good one

if you think this is bad, wait for the .🙏🥴❤️ TLDs

Wait for it to be one of these. 🦶🦶🏻🦶🏼🦶🏽🦶🏾🦶🏿 Good luck not getting scammed by .🦶🏼 when it was actually .🦶🏽 you wanted.
- Oh my god, I did some research
  They're selling emoji domains
  https://xn--i-7iq.ws/ is ground zero
  I strongly advise against buying one. It resolves to unreadable asdfgjkl-Hdlslfjrms.tld anyway, which entirely defeats the purpose.
  Give your money to a charity instead.
  Or give it to me. I will spend it on cigarettes.
Don't you put that voodoo on me!

I hate software that doesn't support Unicode, and it's also not difficult to implement. At one point I wrote a dll that hacked a way how one app was handling filenames, to force it to use CreateFileW instead of CreateFileA. Just that allowed it to support Unicode filenames basically.

Just you wait until latin languages need to throw áccênts and çedils around

I can't believe I'm mentioning svelte kit file structure twice in like a week. I made an example to show in another comment but when I tried to copy and paste here it escaped Ann the characters, so here is a link

https://lemmy.zip/comment/21657580

Edit: I got it. The / at the end are not part of the name, they are just to show that they are folders

    
routes/
+page.ts
(admin)/
  +page.ts
  [user=uuid]/
    [[community]]/
      +page.ts
    posts/
      [...postIds@]/
        +page.ts

TEXTFI~2.TXT

I guess the most annoying part of it to me is that you have put your locations in quotes if you use them in a shell. I do use spaces for file names sometimes, except when writing code or something, then I use underscores.

You can just escape the spaces with a \ .
- Cool I didn't know that

"winamp and play D:"

What an awful folder name D:

But I want to make sure my program is absolutely incompatible with anything except the exact system I am building on and I don't know how to hash a motherboards serial number.

Surely the TPM has this power
- 🤷‍♂️ IDK, I only had to do it once and they never had a problem with it.
  Edit: also the TPM module wasn't as standard back then.

I remember hiding whacky wheels for DOS using ascii characters in the folder name. The professor tried to delete it using win 3.1... Hahahahaha... Good luck with that!

That post inspired this one :)

https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.world/comment/19538308