[GRASS-dev] Re: GRASS startup window patches, map names restrictions

[Maris Nartiss]

Well - there are some restrictions in real life. And they seem to be
just undocumented. That's bad.

I can confirm, that using non-latin character with UTF-8 encoding in
mapset name, will make mapset/GRASS unusable.
Map names also can not contain unicode characters.
Location with unicode chars seem to be OK. Except, it will break
startup screen in text mode :)
IMHO other GRASS places are also not unicode aware.
Locations can not contain spaces - creating new location in text mode
startup screen will simply ignore anything after space. In GUI
creating new location from EPSG code with space in name will simply
result in nothing - no error, no location. Sometimes it will work.


Probably we should push forward policy, that only latin characters and
numbers are allowed in map/mapset names? Like "[a-Z] [0-9] _-".
Pros for such approach: no need to check all GRASS code to be unicode
etc. aware.
Cons: limit's user choice; Unfriendly to non-English speakers.

I see, that "," is now included in illegal character list - it's no
longer possible to create raster map with comma in name. OFT: Comma is
decimal separator in Latvian language (and others too) and thus I once
created map name with comma. I was not able to use that map in other
places anymore ;)


Maris.

2007/1/7, Helena Mitasova <hmitaso at unity.ncsu.edu>:
>
> Maris -there are probably no explicit names restrictions in the
> documentation
> except for "." forbidden in the vector map names but here are some
> recommendations
> from our book - I was just working on it:
>
> Although it is possible to use all combinations of
> characters for the GRASS map names if the map name
> or expression is enclosed within quotes,
> it is safer to follow the name conventions described below.
> First, it is important to avoid spaces and special characters, such
> as a comma,
> dash, exclamation mark etc.  in GRASS map names.
> Starting with GRASS6 dot is not allowed in the vector file names.
> It is also useful to include at least one letter in the map name
> to avoid confusion with numbers being treated as values, especially
> when using
> the map algebra module r.mapcalc.
>
> However, these are just recommendations not restrictions (e.g. I use
> underscore
> or dash in location names all the time).
>
> Helena
>