Mysterious escape characters explained

We received the following question from a customer earlier today.  The question was something that many people are curious about so we've posted both the question and the answer below.  

Q - Is there any way to keep a space from changing to "%20" or "#" from changing to "%23" in a file name that's being uploaded to MDO through web folders or in the Public Folder?

A - The short answer is "No", and there are other special characters as well.

 

Using web folders means each file has to have a web URL and web URLs cannot include certain characters because they are used in HTML itself. "#" is one. Also blanks are not allowed. When a file name includes one of these characters they get replaced with an "escape" character which will start with % and a 2-digit code (%23 = # %20 = blank).

 

This is a web/internet thing, not a My Docs Online thing. All you can do is avoid using them in file names.

 

Here is a complete list (many of them aren't allowed in filenames in any case):

 

Table of URL Escape Characters
Character	Escape Character	Character	Escape Character
Space	%20	#	%23
$	%24	%	%25
&	%26	@	%40
'	%60	/	%2F
:	%3A	;	%3B
<	%3C	=	%3D
>	%3E	?	%3F
[	%5B	\	%5C
]	%5D	^	%5E
{	%7B	|	%7C
}	%7D	~	%7E

 

Scheduled outage for Saturday March 7th

We've got some new hardware that needs to be installed this Saturday, March 7th. The addition of this new hardware will cause at least one outage of about 20 minutes and there may be other brief outages as well. The outages are scheduled for our least busy time of the week, on Saturday between the hours of 2:00 and 5:00 PM EST.   Of course we will do everything we can to keep them as short as possible.

Thanks for your patience as we continue to improve your user experience with My Docs Online.