%20 and the techno-geek oligarchy

Okay - so I made a bunch of WindLight settings I really like and have some from others that I like too. I wanted to make a web page to share them with others.

I made a quick and dirty web page, spent a lot of time making pretty pictures of all my Windlight settings and then went to upload it on my web site.

"Special characters are not allowed in uploaded file names. Please rename the file and try again."

Huh? What special characters?

I look at the all the files and find the XML files mostly have %20 scattered throughout. I've seen this in other places but never bothered to worry about what it is. Then I see one that is different %27. Okay, that one had an apostrophe in the file name, so I can assume the %20 is a space. I had given my windlight settings names with spaces.

No problem, I'll just rename them using real spaces so the upload site will accept them. But first I tried them out in SL with spaces instead of %20.

No deal. They don't work any more.

Okay, I can work around this and just come up with new names for all the settings that have no spaces (AND rewrite all the web pages I made). Maybe I'll try underscore instead. I remember that from way back when computers had little birds and abacuses inside.

My question to any techno-geek types out there is -- what is wrong with you people?

We just like to be annoying.

spacesAreTheDevilsWorkshop.

tryCamelBackNextTime.

@Weston

%20 are spaces in hex, that is correct URL encoding into ASCII when you upload a file. That's how the intenet works . More info you can find here:
http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/ref_urlencode.asp

However I can not find any spaces in the xml files that come with Secondlife. There are however underscores. They are standard ASCII and do not need to be encoded. Simply don't use spaces in filenames. This saves you a lot of trouble

Yeah huh, so what if you actually want to put "%20" in something? What then? ASCII is going to just capriciously assume it's a space?

Ugh....computer people. *shudders*

%% means just % usually. So %20 would be %%20

Pep (Obviously . . . as Einstein was reputed to say)

%20

Edit: Seems actually typing in the code makes this forum actually try to display it. So ignore the amp; part. Just put the & and #37;20 together.

There's two completely separate issues here.

First, here's why it puts %20 in:

<a href=file name with spaces>

That will be seen by the browser as

<a href="file" name="" with="" spaces="">

It's best to avoid spaces in file names, or replace them with some other character like underscores. It wasn't until UNIX came along that the idea of file names containing spaces was anything but crazy talk, or confusion about fixed-field file names (eg, in some operating systems the name "fred.exe" was just a shorthand for "fred exe" with enough spaces between "fred" and "exe" to pad it out to 6 or 8 or 9 or whatever the field width was).

Now you COULD write it like this:

<a href="file name with spaces">

But the quotes are optional in HTML and it's safer to URL-encode it if you NEED spaces:

<a href="file%20name%20with%20spaces">

If you want to put a literal "%20" in a file name, you encode the "%" as "%25", so you end up with "%2520".

Second, the "%20" issue is a red herring. Your browser will do the "%20" or "%2520" encoding for you. The real problem is that the website he's uploading the file to doesn't allow spaces in file names at all. There's a number of reasons for this, depending on how the website works, but it could well be that they're trying to avoid contributing to the confusion in the first part of this issue, by disallowing any characters that require % encoding in transmission or embedded in HTML.

Not in URL-encoding.

You're mixing up entity encoding and URL encoding. That works embeded in HTML but not in other contexts, and wouldn't work for the OP's problem.

ARRRGH! My keyboard HAS a % key. But in ASCII it is useless.

Talk about making things more complicated.