Why are special chars used in Labview filenames supplied by NI? By special chars, I mean ampersands, questions marks, Plus signs, slashes etc. Thats just bad practice in an otherwise good product.

Question

I would like to request that National not use such filenames anymore. Spaces should also be avoided. Just use a format such as MyFileNameWillSuffice.vi.

Answer 1

> Perl. I carry that naming style from those languages. Questions marks
> used to be (maybe still are) used as wild card characters. I have run
> into problems on a Solaris machine when there were spaces in the file
> names. Plus signs slashes (/ or \) are a definite nono. So should
> !@#$%^&*()|.
>
> All those other languages have defined coding standards which serve to
> make code more readable and easier to maintain.
The LabVIEW coding guidelines warn against using some of those symbols,
but it isn't nearly as limiting as you might want. The reason for this
is that you rarely use VI names on a command line. If you are using
them, then simply "" the path. Feel free to further limit the
characters used in naming your own VIs, but
the names of VIs in vi.lib
and toolkits have already been determined and have in many cases been in
use for five to ten years. They do not cause problems.
Just for the record, LV is also localized into several languages
including Japanese and many of those customers use their native language
and native characters. Again, this doesn't cause problems.
Greg McKaskle