Issue with some strange characters when renaming episodes

cambendy

20-04-2009 22:25:09

Every time I do a rename check the following specific episodes are set up to rename again and again.

30 Rock, Season 1, Episode 14

Survivor, Season 15, Episode 6

I have included below an excerpt from the renaimingxml output file for your reference.
- <Item>
<Operation>Rename</Operation>
<FromFolder>\\space\volume_2\tv\30 Rock\Season 1</FromFolder>
<FromName>30 Rock - S01E14 - The _C_ Word.avi</FromName>
<ToFolder>\\space\volume_2\tv\30 Rock\Season 1</ToFolder>
<ToName>30 Rock - S01E14 - The “C” Word.avi</ToName>
<ShowName>30 Rock</ShowName>
<Season>1</Season>
<EpNum>14</EpNum>
<EpNum2 />
</Item>
- <Item>
<Operation>Rename</Operation>
<FromFolder>\\space\volume_2\tv\Survivor\Season 15</FromFolder>
<FromName>Survivor - S15E06 - That_s Love, Baby! It Makes You Strong!.avi</FromName>
<ToFolder>\\space\volume_2\tv\Survivor\Season 15</ToFolder>
<ToName>Survivor - S15E06 - That’s Love, Baby! It Makes You Strong!.avi</ToName>
<ShowName>Survivor</ShowName>
<Season>15</Season>
<EpNum>6</EpNum>
<EpNum2 />
</Item>


Cheers, and thanks for a great product!

CamBendy

sstteevvee

26-04-2009 13:29:20

My guess on the 30 Rock one is that there are (were) "smart quotes" around the C. Looking at thetvdb, they appear to be back to normal single quotes now. Is the problem still happening for 30 Rock?

In Survivor S15E06, the apostrophe in "That's" is also a "smart" apostrophe ( ’ vs. ' ). Being a smart quote shouldn't cause problems, though - unicode characters aren't illegal on Windows filesystems.

What type of machine is your "\\space" fileserver? Is it possibly "sanitising" filenames, replacing unicode/non-8-bit characters with underscores? You could try opening the Survivor folder in Explorer, and attempting to manually rename the file to a copy+paste of "Survivor - S15E06 - That’s Love, Baby! It Makes You Strong!.avi". After the rename, refresh the folder (F5) and see if it has gone back to an underscore.

cambendy

27-04-2009 07:08:38

Ok - did a little bit of testing and you are correct.

That damned smart quote is getting renamed by the system. My Windows machine says it's a valid name but the NAS is playing funny buggers with it and sanitises the smart quotes to an underscore.

"//space" is a Dlink DNS-323 with the drives formatted as jbod I think. Basically, it's not really a windows file system.

A desirable solution for this would perhaps be an option to automatically convert smart quotes to.. dumb quotes? ;)

And yes, the 30 Rock episode has been renamed so I no longer see this issue.

BTW - thanks for this app - saved me from home brewing, which I was about to start using the thetvdb libraries and DB.

sstteevvee

01-05-2009 15:18:06

Good to have tracked it down. One of the things on my to-do list is fully customisable filename character replacements, so that'd let you take care of any quirky situations like this one. From here, I'd suggest either editing the Survivor episode on thetvdb and changing it to dumb quotes, or making a post to their forums and find out what their policy on smart vs. dumb quotes are. If you were really enthusiastic, you could try DLink support, and see what they have to say about not supporting unicode character sets on something that is pretending to be a Windows fileserver.