Is it best to avoid apostrophes and spaces in the name of a Glulx file, or does that not make a difference?
I know of no problems there.
The first game in Index: if-archive/games/glulx is called 'Steading of the Hill Giant Chief.gblorb so you can test it out if you like.
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Ok, thank you. It’s not a problem on my system–I just wasn’t sure if there were any concerns for other systems. I see files on IFArchive that use hyphens or underscores instead of spaces, but maybe that’s just a convention.
I feel like… I have run into problems somewhere. It’d obviously be cooler if I could remember exactly where.
I have put glulx or gblorb files in personal webspace, tweaked their host html page css, had them connected to scripts that recorded transcripts off the sites. I feel pretty sure the spaces caused me problems somewhere amongst the chains of these activities, causing me to immediately just retreat to a conservative naming approach that invited less danger (hyphens for spaces and not much else for gussying up and shortish file names in general).
-Wade
That was actually an entry in the Bad IF Jam (the gag is that except for one room and five object declarations, per the title the whole thing is written in obnoxiously convoluted Instead rules), so maybe don’t test things out by playing it 
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I guess when I think on it some more, the whole file name’s not that big a deal in general. I mean, the game file is identified by its serial number / IFID, not the file name. People rename files all the time to suit their taste or circumstance.
If your file ends up in a circumstance where the name causes trouble, you or someone else will rename it. So in the circumstances I described in my last post, I had trouble, and took to a particular approach for those circumstances.
-Wade
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Ideally, report it so we can figure out which tool is mishandling the filename and fix it.
Thanks, everybody!
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I’m not aware of any issues specific to Glulxe, but as far as I know:
Spaces aren’t allowed in URLs, so any file with spaces in its name will automatically have spaces converted to I believe %20 in the URL you get if you do a right click, copy URL on the download link to a file.
Spaces have to be escaped when typing a filename into the Linux Console or a terminal emulator in Linux. I would assume this also holds for OSx, BSD, and other Unix-like OSes and have no idea for the Command Prompt under Windows.
Dashes in filenames can sometimes cause issues at the Linux command line as dash and double dash are used by most commands for setting options for the command, though I think this is mostly an issue if a filename begins with a dash and can be rendered a non-issue with a solitary double dash after any options using dashes but before the offending files.
Single or double quotes in a filename can cause issues in the Linux command line since both are used for marking string literals in command arguments.
As far as I know, there is no technical issue with underscores anywhere.
Personally, when naming files, I mostly stick to alphanumeric characters with either spaces between words or camelCase, the latter mostly with source code and using dashes only for filenames containing dates and limiting periods to right before the extention or to make the file hidden. Back when I had a working eye, spaces looked cleaner and they read cleaner even if I have punctuation cranked up in my screen reader settings, plus spaces are less hassle to type than underscores. Sure, they have to be escaped at the command line and I do everything that I don’t do in a browser at the command line, but tab completion takes care of that most of the time and it’s mostly an issue when I have two files in the same directory where the first word of the file I want is the first part of the first word of another (e.g. what versus whatever week versus weekend, How versus Howard). Also, lots of punctuation have special purposes at the command line, lots of unicode characters aren’t proprerly displayed/read in the console, and some characters allowed in file names on an EXT4 filesystem aren’t valid on a FAT32 filesystem.
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That’s just an artifact of history now. The IF-Archive started back in 1991 or 1992 as an FTP site. Back then there were plenty of systems restricted to 8.3 file names, so files were commonly kept to that format. The index files were just plain text, like
Name.z5 This is a game by An Author.
Later Zarf set up a mirror site with exciting new-fangled HTML pages, and wrote a tool to convert those simple index files to a HTML list. But the index files separated the file name and its description with spaces, so we generally tried to avoid having spaces in file names.
Now all the indexes are XML, so none of this matters any more, and file names can be pretty much anything. But there are still lots of older files in the Archive following the old conventions.
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