Page 1 of 1

Dealing with Ghost - Unknown - Invalid Chars

Posted: 15 Mar 2012 17:51
by SkyFrontier
Often I am stumbling upon some unknown/invalid/ghost characters and this is getting me nervous as I simply can't deal with them, being it search and replacing on text or using sections containing them as base for new file names.

Writing it as inline message makes it unusable - I asked a friend for help and took a time to realize he wasn't seeing anything, so I attached a .txt containing more info plus a string containing the char itself plus some code I used to diagnose the problem.

Test: "
" > the mere posting of it on forum turned it into a <crlf>'ed square.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Dealing with Ghost - Unknown - Invalid Chars

Posted: 15 Mar 2012 18:03
by Twisten
I ran into such a file once, in the end I used the command prompt and renamed it by referring to it by its DOS (8.3) name.

Re: Dealing with Ghost - Unknown - Invalid Chars

Posted: 07 Apr 2012 08:54
by selukwe
A good program for this is freeware Unlocker - http://www.emptyloop.com/unlocker/. It loads as context-sensitive right-click menu and will force-delete locked files as well as force-rename files containing unsupported characters or just "rubbish"/invalid chars... Small yet very powerful tool.