Send to device puts most books in the wrong place, consistently

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

Thank you, davidfor. Indeed, you did give me the right answer.

Is the 185 character limit to the path the only restriction? No additional restriction regarding the file name length? (obviously there are other restrictions regarding illegal characters).
And regarding to path, what, exactly, does that include? Take for example:

C:/Books/Hastie, Trevor & Tibshirani, Robert & Friedman, Jerome/The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition

Is the "C:/" part counted towards that 185 character limit?

The reason I ask is that I'd like to write something a bit more robust and need a clear understanding what's going on under the hood.

The 185 characters limit is the only restriction I can think of. It will include the drive and the extension.

For the characters used, calibre will sanitize the path after it has been generated. That replaces replaces accented characters and similar with their equivalents. And replaces other illegal characters with an underscore. And Kobo has a couple of characters that shouldn't be used that are handled as well.

[Moonbase59]

Quick note to Tolino users: Be aware that the Tolinos only show (and sort by) one author—unfortunately the last one!

Learned this the hard way and had to change my device save template accordingly, to at least find the book again. Sigh.

(Observed this in firmware versions 14.2.0 up to and including 15.2.0.)

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I ran into the shortened path issue years back with an anthology that listed 42 authors in the authors list. It made for a rather interesting entry in my library.

I ran into the issue with a fanfic with multiple lengthy author names resulting in a K:\Fanion\ folder appearing on my device. The entire path, if untruncated, would've been 205 characters. Using sublist shortened it down nicely to 156.

Originally Posted by davidfor

For the characters used, calibre will sanitize the path after it has been generated. That replaces replaces accented characters and similar with their equivalents. And replaces other illegal characters with an underscore. And Kobo has a couple of characters that shouldn't be used that are handled as well.

It's possible to bypass the sanitizing of illegal characters like this:

{#kobopath:re(_,/)}

You'll want to be careful with it; I think the only character that's truly safe is "/" to create subdirs.