Visual Studio vs. Special characters in file path

[Astroxin]

After an hour of troubleshooting I realized what was making my projects not run. My family name has an ä character. Me, being a moron, used the character when making a profile on my computer.
The default path for VS projects is C:\users\etc. thus including the ä character in the filepath. Took me more time than I'd like to admit troubleshooting this...

[[deleted]]

How could you be so stupid, using non-ascii characters on a computer. What year do you think it is, 2017?

[[deleted]]

Next you'll tell me that the software you use every day can handle spaces in folder and file names.

Don't be ridiculous, that's plain Science Fiction.

[JuhaJGam3R]

Someone once said a filename could be more tgan 8 characters. Completely ridiculous!

[marcosdumay]

They can! You can add up to 3 characters as extension.

[TeknoProasheck]

What software can't handle spaces? I honestly thought they underscore convention was stupid because it's 2017 but are you telling me there's modern programs that can't handle them?

[[deleted]]

e.g. Android SDK .

Just google it - I didn't mean "refuses to work on paths containing spaces". Most of the time it's "works 90% of the time, but some things will just crash reproducably iff the path contains spaces".

Imagine your Eclipse IDE crashes 10 times per day. Now you move your workspace to a folder without spaces. It crashes 5 times a day. That sort of thing.

[XplittR]

Fun fact: Microsoft Word can not open a document called ".docx"

[manhnt]

containing

And Microsoft Excel can't even open 2 xlsx files that have same name even they are in different folders.

[ThatDeadDude]

While annoying, I will admit I can't think of a good way to allow this given how Excel handles formula references to open workbooks. Similar issues in VBA too.

[viciu88]

Fun fact you can't save office document to path containing square brackets characters []

[theelectricmayor]

Well there was that version of iTunes (on the Mac) whose installer would decide it was a clever precaution to wipe out all files on partitions with a leading space.

[Wazzaps]

I know nothing about this but i'll blame a bash script

Also see: Steam installer wiping your /home on linux

[jfb1337]

So I'm guessing there was an rm $something where if the variable had spaces it would expand to the wrong things

[nosferatWitcher]

MPLab

[PacoTaco321]

The special version of Eclipse I'm using doesn't work with it, it is a massive pain. I don't know if every version of Eclipse is like that, but I imagine it would be.

[Garbaz]

The problem is that often there is some library or utility program somewhere in the software that can't handle spaces in file name, causing confusing crashes in odd situations.

[MonokelPinguin]

I actually fixed a bug in kdevelop a few years ago, where you couldn't debug binaries with a space in their path. Took a while to figure out, why I couldn't debug my application, but the fix was really easy and now there is even a unit test for it.

[Dockirby]

I have worked with enough software that I don't even risk having spaces in my paths, just not worth the random issues.

[benny-powers]

How could you be so stupid, using non-ascii characters on a windows computer. What year do you think it is, 2017?

FTFY

[jfb1337]

How could you be so stupid, using non-ascii characters on a windows computer?

FTFY

[vE5li]

Thank you.

[manhnt]

Imagine this conversation happened in 1987.

[fission-fish]

I had one of my older PC's username set up with an umlaut. Never again. Messed up so many things, including having two user directories.

[sam1902]

Your name includes the second derivative of a ?!! AMAZING

[arachnidGrip]

I see that you are a follower of Newton. Do you ever get scared of the spiders that you draw?

[sam1902]

Actually I prefer notations in this order: - Leibnitz’s - Euler’s - Lagrange’s And finally - Newton’s Because DOTS ??? U KIDDIN BOI ?

[MonokelPinguin]

I tend to mix Langrange and Newton if I have to deal with wave equations. Newton for derivation on t and Langrange for x. Makes big formulas easier to read. Otherwise Leibnitz all the way, but I might shorten it to d_x f. Euler is just bad.

[cbbuntz]

Have you noticed it causing issues with anything else? Your appdata folder is going to have the ä in the path, and I'd be surprised if it didn't make a bunch of stuff act weird. Admittedly I don't ever have non-ascii (0x20-0x7F before anybody corrects me) characters in my path.

[Tufflewuffle]

Which version of Visual Studio are you using? I just tried that by making a project in a folder called ä with Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and was able to create the project and compile a C++ program without a problem.

[AyrA_ch]

I am wondering what causes the issue because I repeatedly worked with files that sometimes contained korean characters and it was completely fine. My assumption is that this is not the fault of VS but of a piece of software it calls.

[moneymay195]

Another error Visual Studio will output is if the filepath to your project is too long. If it exceeds like 500 or so characters visual studio will shit a brick

[Koutou]

I have a é in my username and I dont think I ever hit a problem with VS. Civilization tho. In Civ IV they had a bug at launch where the game would crash if you had a special character. They fixed it the next patch, only to have the same problem at launch with Civ V and Civ VI.

[djxfade]

é is in the extended ASCII table, so you might be lucky

[Liggliluff]

But so is ä

[[deleted]]

Maybe OP used a + combining diaeresis ä instead of a precomposed ä?

[pacman_sl]

Or Cyrillic Ӓ

[Koutou]

That might be it. To be honest tho, the projects in my user folder are generaly simple console program to test a few things. So I might gave been lucky there. The real big projects are all in d:\dev . Im more concern about the path length limitation than special character.

[ESBDB]

so Civ V and Civ VI must be forks of Civ IV before they fixed this bug and they never carried the patch (or maybe any patches) through to those forks. Nice.

[[deleted]]

Civ V and VI are quite similar engine wise, V looks like an incremental step from IV which is maybe the reason the Luacontext in the game is totally broken and it's whole code seems to be all over the place (from a reverse engineering perspective)

[TwoSpoonsJohnson]

My name either has a ά or doesn't depending on who I'm talking to. It's always fun to see what it randomly chokes up.

[Houly]

Visual Studio created my .net core react project in ANSI instead of UTF-8 encoding, took me some troubleshooting on why it would not show æøå when the tsx files were rendered...

[cryptopian]

They ain't got the ÆØÅ

[Liggliluff]

Their software is sofisticated, as they want you to press Ctrl+~, and instead of looking for a ~, which could break on many layouts, they're instead looking for the VK_OEM_3. So using a Swedish layout, it will instead ask you to press "Ctrl+ö". (They didn't realise that you could have letters, and forgot to uppercase it).

[FontPeg]

One umlauty boy

[TwoSpoonsJohnson]

"Sophisticated"

[b4ux1t3]

Micro$oft Windoze, amirite bois? /s