Naff coding

A side discussion in Community support covered the lamentable behaviour of MS Word and its auto-created filenames taken from the first text in the document.

in fact it created the document name from the first paragraph, which for sensible documents was usually the title.

Yeah, I know. I just couldn’t be bothered typing out something of that length

However, a bit of cut and paste, paste, paste… shows that the limit is 242 for some reason and although it accepts a comma in a manually added filename the auto filename generation breaks at the comma.
Similar behaviour with the text including the apostrophe in won’t – auto breaks at the apostrophe, but a manually supplied accepts that and everything up to the length limit.
Must have used a kid who did well in the “look I’m coding” adverts to do the coding in that bit (at least, maybe more)

Sample text
this wont break until the comma this wont break until the comma this wont break until, the comma this wont break until the comma this wont break until the comma this wont break until the comma this wont break until the comm

this won’t make it past the apostrophe so the rest is irrelevant.

A side discussion in Community support covered the lamentable behaviour of MS Word.

FTFY. 😉

Well, yes, but the starting subject was ‘dodgy’ character use in filenames.

However, a bit of cut and paste, paste, paste… shows that the limit is 242 for some reason

and to my surprise, a file with a name that long can be dragged to RISC OS using LanmanFS. 242 characters can’t be much less than the limit imposed by the use of messages (255 character limit) tocommunicate.

and to my surprise, a file with a name that long can be dragged to RISC OS using LanmanFS. 242 characters can’t be much less than the limit imposed by the use of messages (255 character limit) tocommunicate.

What about when you put it in a directory in a directory in a…

The real question is why anyone would want an actual file leafname of 242 characters anyway.

More to the point is that even in Windows (under the bonnet so to speak) a space is a delimiter so to include a file called “this file” you must put quotes around the whole thing.

Essentially Word auto-generates filenames and breaks off at exactly the wrong characters. It should break off at a space it should not break off at an apostrophe or comma etc.
Typical American normalcy¹ and about par for the course with MS.

¹ That should be noted as perpendicular or right-angles to the normal, but as Clive pointed out with Americans² it’s actually “at wrong angles” to the rest of the world.

It should break off at a space it should not break off at an apostrophe or comma etc.

But then you will confuse all the users who just write letters, as everything will attempt to save as “Dear.docx”

But then you will confuse all the users who just write letters, as everything will attempt to save as “Dear.docx”

There’s no hope for people like that¹. Of course, you do wonder how they currently file Dear Sir(1).docx, Dear Sir(2).docx, Dear Sir(3).docx etc.²

¹ I’m not sure precisely why but an old, apocryphal, story comes to mind.
The one about the phone call to the Word Perfect support line – that finishes "Yes, I’m afraid you have send everything back as you’re too f****** stupid to own a computer.

The one about the phone call to the Word Perfect support line – that finishes "Yes, I’m afraid you have send everything back as you’re too f****** stupid to own a computer.

I used to have that as an audio file, back in the days of Windows 95!

I used to have that as an audio file, back in the days of Windows 95!

Audio? New fangled stuff. It was text on DOS… :)