Ampersand in file name

Hi,

We are facing an issue where if there is an ampersand in filename followed by a space, then it throws a Hopi Error (file or Directory not found) while submitting the file.
For ex. - If the file name is ABC & DEF then TeamSite throws an error while submitting this file. We are submitting this file using a custom workflow created using workflow modeler. We found the following error in trace.log -
File not found - ABC &DEF. Note the space after the ampersand is removed. We are also not able to rename or delete this file.
I have tested for ABC &DEF and ABC&DEF and they all worked.
Has anyone else faced this issue earlier? Is there any solution or patch to fix this?
Thanks in advance.

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jagadesh

Hi,

We are facing an issue where if there is an ampersand in filename followed by a space, then it throws a Hopi Error (file or Directory not found) while submitting the file.
For ex. - If the file name is ABC & DEF then TeamSite throws an error while submitting this file. We are submitting this file using a custom workflow created using workflow modeler. We found the following error in trace.log -
File not found - ABC &DEF. Note the space after the ampersand is removed. We are also not able to rename or delete this file.
I have tested for ABC &DEF and ABC&DEF and they all worked.
Has anyone else faced this issue earlier? Is there any solution or patch to fix this?
Thanks in advance.

The best practice in naming convention at unix environment is
Characters you should not use in filenames:
| ; , ! @ # $ ( ) < > / \ " ' ` ~ { } [ ] = + & ^

Incase user has used mistakenly and need to remove or rename try to use in such a way to accomplish it
rm "File Name"
rm ABC\&DEF
rm "ABC&DEF"

Auli2

Thanks for the reply Jagadeesh.
I have checked and this is not an OS issue. Also, if OS allows to create a file then user can create the file with that name. But the problem is that the file can not be submitted.

Adam Stoller

Hi,

We are facing an issue where if there is an ampersand in filename followed by a space, then it throws a Hopi Error (file or Directory not found) while submitting the file.
For ex. - If the file name is ABC & DEF then TeamSite throws an error while submitting this file. We are submitting this file using a custom workflow created using workflow modeler. We found the following error in trace.log -
File not found - ABC &DEF. Note the space after the ampersand is removed. We are also not able to rename or delete this file.
I have tested for ABC &DEF and ABC&DEF and they all worked.
Has anyone else faced this issue earlier? Is there any solution or patch to fix this?
Thanks in advance.

You need to verify that the filename is getting properly escaped before being acted on, which may be difficult to tell.
The OS will let you create a file with such characters in the name - but that doesn't make it a good practice - characters such as '&', '<', and '>' are especially tricky because that have significant meanings in XML and/or HTML and if they aren't properly escaped or translated into entities, then the code that parses the XML and/or HTML will likely choke on them. Other characters like space and tab characters also cause issues because, unless properly quoted such that the white space is seen as embedded characters, they appear more like separators and so instead of programs seeing one file named "this and that" they see three files:

You, as a developer are then tasked with trying to facilitate ease of creation of files and directories with automated fixing of file and directory names to avoid problems. This is most often done in DCTs with FormAPI code, but it can be done in other locations using similar code that performs fairly basic regex processing (at least for Latin / Roman alphabets, other alphabets may require a bit more code to handle correctly)

Auli2

Thanks Adam.
I will try FormAPI to sort the problem.