Any symbols not to use?

roguefan99 · 07-23-2010, 11:21 PM

Oh second thought to my problem I noticed the file I was trying up upload that had a problem contained the & symbol in both the title, filename and author (triple threat!), so just wondering if that caused the problem?

pholy · 07-24-2010, 10:21 AM

In html, the & character is an escape character which should introduce a named or numbered character entity. It is not clear to me (I can't find a reference) what should happen when there is no valid entity after the & character. So locking up is a possibility; but not a good choice, of course. The title and author, of course, are meta data, part of the html, so, no bare-naked & allowed. If you must have an & in meta data, it should be expressed as & or & - but I haven't tested that anywhere - an exercise for the interested student... or something to add to the epub conformance tests.

In most Linux shells, the & character is the backgrounding operator, so if you must have a & in a filename, you have to quote the filename. Since you can't know how the reader's embedded code handles filenames, the & is best avoided in filenames, as well.

07-23-2010, 11:21 PM	#1
roguefan99 Zealot Posts: 106 Karma: 16 Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Adelaide, Australia Device: Smart Q7, and Kobo	Any symbols not to use? Oh second thought to my problem I noticed the file I was trying up upload that had a problem contained the & symbol in both the title, filename and author (triple threat!), so just wondering if that caused the problem?

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Non-ascii symbols on Story	James_Wilde	iRiver Story	13	09-12-2010 05:15 AM
Numbers appear to be treated as symbols in Kindle 3	osnova	Amazon Kindle	2	07-29-2010 06:30 PM
PDF converts to symbols	robkat	Calibre	1	01-14-2010 12:02 PM
Music symbols	rxsz	Astak EZReader	1	12-19-2009 10:43 AM
Convert PDF with Math symbols?	daithi81	Sony Reader	10	10-13-2009 07:44 AM

07-24-2010, 10:21 AM	#2
pholy Booklegger Posts: 1,801 Karma: 7999816 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Device: BeBook(1 & 2010), PEZ, PRS-505, Kobo BT, PRS-T1, Playbook, Kobo Touch	In html, the & character is an escape character which should introduce a named or numbered character entity. It is not clear to me (I can't find a reference) what should happen when there is no valid entity after the & character. So locking up is a possibility; but not a good choice, of course. The title and author, of course, are meta data, part of the html, so, no bare-naked & allowed. If you must have an & in meta data, it should be expressed as & or & - but I haven't tested that anywhere - an exercise for the interested student... or something to add to the epub conformance tests. In most Linux shells, the & character is the backgrounding operator, so if you must have a & in a filename, you have to quote the filename. Since you can't know how the reader's embedded code handles filenames, the & is best avoided in filenames, as well.

Advert