Jump to content

Illegal character

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In computer science, an illegal character is a character that is not allowed by a certain programming language, protocol, or program.[1] To avoid illegal characters, some languages may use an escape character which is a backslash followed by another character.[2]

Examples

[edit]

Windows

[edit]

In the Windows operating system, illegal characters in file and folder names include colons, brackets, question marks,[3] and null characters.[4]

Illegal characters in Windows file names[4]
Character Name
< less than
> greater than
: colon
" speech marks
/ forward slash
\ backslash
| pipe
? question mark
* asterisk

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "illegal character | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  2. ^ "Python Escape Characters". www.w3schools.com. Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  3. ^ "What Are Illegal Characters? (with pictures)". Easy Tech Junkie. 2023-08-12. Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  4. ^ a b alvinashcraft (2022-12-15). "Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces - Win32 apps". learn.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2023-09-07.