THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE APPLIES TO:
DISCUSSION
The following are best practices for naming files that will be uploaded to your Web or FTP site. Following these suggestions will help you avoid many of the pitfalls caused by the many disparate operating systems, browsers, and Web or FTP servers that are used on the Internet.
- File names should be kept short. (e.g., mycatpicture.gif)
- File names should be as meaningful as possible. (e.g., instead of dsc00035.gif, try BabyJimsFirstBottle_05052009)
- File names should be in lowercase. (Some servers convert to lowercase automatically; some servers do not care about case.)
- File names should never contain spaces or special characters. When necessary, file names should contain hyphens, not underscores, to join words. (e.g., picture-of-intrepid-accident-05-05-2009.gif)
GlobalSCAPE products follow the standard Windows naming conventions, with a few exceptions (such as no support for Unicode characters).
- You can name files using almost any character for a name, except for the following reserved characters: < > : " / \ | ? *
- The maximum length for a path is 255 characters. This limitation includes the drive letter, colon, backslash, directories, subdirectories, filename, and extension.
For more information regarding file-naming conventions, refer to the Microsoft Windows Developer Network article Naming a File.