Should special characters be supported in file names?

I believe the character rules are defined in the general Linux filename vocabulary. I have had a few file errors pop up mostly with addons inserting ( and ) in mp3 filenames and sometimes in mkv files as well. Sometimes they cause no issues in LE or Kodi until I attempt a copy/move with the Kodi file manager. Maybe one of our Linux gurus can point us to the list of verbotten characters for future reference.

See https://www.tecmint.com/special-charac…enames_in_Linux

Problem is not about international characters being special. Problem is about myriad ways to write them and code written in Python can be really picky about it.

I ran into a problem 4 years ago, when I was hosting files via HTTP to Kodi. The bug was in Kodi, it's HTML parser was incomplete, it didn't handle character entities properly. It's possible the issue is with your SFTP server, or in the SFTP vfs component in Kodi, a bit hard to say.

I can tell you what does work fine, with UTF-8 encoded file names, ampersands, quotes, dashes, etc, etc, etc is NFS. You might want to start with using sftp on your Kodi box (and perhaps your Windows PC or other computers) to see how the filename is presented. SFTP is supposed to be support UTF-8 encoded filenames.

Oh my what a can of worms. I did some checking and found this list which seems pretty complete for Linux and Windows however I also found left and right parenthesis are allowed in filenames KODI file manager dosen't like them and will cause errors. So possibly KODI's file manager has it's own set of filename rules. Here's the list I found:

The forbidden printable ASCII characters are:

Linux/Unix:

/ (forward slash)

Windows:

< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon - sometimes works, but is actually NTFS Alternate Data Streams)
" (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)