Neat and clean filenames

Best practice for tidy filenames

Have you ever noticed an address to a document online that looks like this?

/InternationalApplication%20-%20edited%2009.26.09.pdf

The "%20" that appears several times in the address gets added every time there is a space in the original filename. This is necessary because a space in the address would break the link. So "%20" is added as a placeholder so that there is no space and the link will work. It's pretty hard to read, though, isn't it? It's messy.

So what can you do to avoid messy filenames?

Well, you could just take out all the spaces and run the words together, but that is also hard to read. Or, you could add underscores between words, but that gets hard to read too, because most links are underlined. Underlining will effectively cancel out the underscores - you won't be able to see them.

So the best solution is to put dashes between words. The above filename would become:

/InternationalApplication-edited-09.26.09.pdf

Much better!

 

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Posted at 4:21 PM | Comments (0)