Safe Characters
The following character sets are generally safe for use in file names:
- Alphanumeric characters: 0-9, a-z, A-Z
- Special characters: !, -, _, ., *, ', (, and )
Characters to Avoid
You should avoid the following characters in a file name:
- Ampersand "&"
- Dollar "$"
- ASCII character ranges 00–1F hex (0–31 decimal) and 7F (127 decimal.)
- 'At' symbol "@"
- Equals "="
- Semicolon ";"
- Colon ":"
- Plus "+"
- Space – Significant sequences of spaces may be lost in some uses (especially multiple spaces)
- Comma ","
- Question mark "?"
- Backslash "\"
- Left curly brace "{"
- Non-printable ASCII characters (128–255 decimal characters)
- Caret "^"
- Right curly brace "}"
- Percent character "%"
- Grave accent / back tick "`"
- Right square bracket "]"
- Quotation marks
- 'Greater Than' symbol ">"
- Left square bracket "["
- Tilde "~"
- 'Less Than' symbol ("<"
- 'Pound' character "#"
- Vertical bar / pipe "|"