How do I find file names containing special character

Question

hi all
I need your help with a code that deals with finding file names containing special characters like * / \ : ? " |
the reason is I am doing a project that transfer files and folders from Mac to Windows. But names containing above characters cant be moved to windows.
the part of the code I write is like this
set illegal_syntax to paragraphs of (do shell script "find " & quoted form of POSIX path of oneFolder & " -name '*'")
if (illegal_syntax is not equal to {""}) then
repeat with each_record in illegal_syntax
do shell script "/usr/bin/ditto -c -k -rsrc --keepParent " & quoted form of each_record & space & quoted form of (each_record & ".zip")
end repeat
end if
First of all that '' will gives me an error.
Second, what i tried to do is once the file/folder is found, zip it at current location. But the problem is how can I zip it without the special character? or should I just give it a name, like "originalfile.zip";?
Last, or maybe you have better idea to deal with this situation? BTW, I can not rename or delete the file/folder because customer won't allow me to do it.

Answer 1

The backslash is used to escape characters in AppleScript, so if you want to use it in a string you need to escape the escape character, for example "\\*".
You could set the name of the archive by replacing the illegal character with another one, such as an underscore:
<pre title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor" style="font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 10px; padding: 5px; border: 1px solid #000000; width: 720px; color: #000000; background-color: #FFDDFF; overflow: auto">set each_record to "some*file*name" -- example
set {TempTID, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, "*"}
set the ItemList to text items of each_record
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "_"
set each_record to the ItemList as text
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to TempTID
log each_record --> some_file_name
</pre>