RE: [WinMac] ASCII differences

CORP, GERLMO(thomas.walsh[at]corporate.ge.com)
Mon, 27 Jul 1998 09:13:46 -0400

Windows 95 does not understand a few characters the Macs do. For instance
the "/" is illegal because it delimits the directory names. For instance...

Mac directory name would look like this:
Hard Drive:System Folder:Preferences

the IBM directory name for the same folder would look like this:
Hard Drive/System Folder/Preferences

The underscores you see on a Win95 machine when looking at NT Mac shares are
not actual underscores they are substitutions for illegal characters. Like
the / ? ' < >...

Below is some further explanation...

Hope this helps,

Tom
:8-)

PS

******
Documentation Quoted from Microsoft Naming a File or Directory On Windows NT, tiles on both the Widows NT file system (NTFS), and the File
Allocation Table (FAT) file system can be up to 255 characters. All of the following file naming rules apply to both NTFS and FAT: - Names can be up to 255 characters long including extensions. Separate the
extension from the name with a period. - Names preserve case, but are not case sensitive . Windows NT retains your
use of uppercase and lowercase letters; however, Windows NT does not
distinguish filenames by their case. Names can contain any uppercase or lowercase?
characters except the following: ? ' / \ < > * | : and the space character When you create a long name, File Manager automatically creates a shorter,
MS DOS style name. This allows MS DOS based computers and applications that
do not support long file names to use the directory or file. However, if you save a
file using an application that does not support long filenames, the long
filename will be lost and the file will have only a short name. When you create a long name on
either NTFS or FAT, Windows NT follows these rules to create the short name: - Spaces are removed. Periods are removed except for the last period in the
filename that is followed by a character. Windows NT interprets this period
as marking the start of the filename's extension. - The following characters, not allowed in MS DOS style names, are changed
to underscores (_): + .; = [ 1 - The name, not including its extension, is truncated to 6 characters and a
tilde (~) and a number are appended. - The name's extension is truncated to 3 characters. The creation of short names in NTFS and FAT is different in the following
ways: On FAT, extended characters that are valid in the current code page
can appear in short, MS DOS style name. On NTFS, extended characters are never allowed in
short names. - On NTFS, if you give a file or directory a name that is also a valid short
name, no separate short name is over displayed. On FAT, short names are
always displayed, even when they are identical to the long names.

********

> ----------
> From: Leonard Rosenthol
> Sent: Friday, July 24, 1998 9:25 AM
> Subject: Re: [WinMac] ASCII differences
>
> At 8:50 AM -0400 7/24/98, Romeyn Prescott wrote:
> >Excuse my ignorance, but I always thought that ASCII was ASCII no matter
> >the platform. I have since discovered that Mac and PC ASCII differ in
> >small ways.
> >
> 7 bit ASCII (aka the bottom 128 characters) are the same on both
> Mac and PC (and all other platforms that support ASCII) - HOWEVER 8 bit
> ASCII (aka Extended ASCII and the top 128 characters) differ between
> platforms.
>
>
> >I recently copied a file with an underscore ('_') in the file name from a
> >Mac to an NT server only to find that the file was not recognized by a
> >Windows 95 computer and, furthermore, I could not rename or delete the
> file
> >(now on the NT server) using the Mac that copied the file to the NT
> server
> >in the first place!
> >
> That sounds like a bug in the software somewhere - either in the
> server or the client. An underscore is a valid character for filenames on
> both Mac and Win.
>
>
> Leonard
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
> Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:leonardr@adobe.com>
> Designated Free Electron (612) 766-4718 (Minn)
> Adobe Systems Incorporated (215) 233-5270 (Philly)
>
> PGP Fingerprint: 8CC9 8878 921E C627 0BC1 15BB FC19 64A9 0016 1397
>
>
>

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Mon Jul 27 1998 - 06:11:52 PDT