[Info-vax] OpenVMS - DCL - Data entry filtering

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-27 18:41:05 +0000, JF Mezei said:

> The text is free form so it often includes weird and funky characters 
> so those strings need to be normalised so they can be included in a 
> file name.

So you're working around the limitations of the particular local file 
system?  You could pick a file system for suited to the task — VMS can 
sort-of UTF-8 names, and other file systems on other platforms can 
accept UTF-8 names much more directly — or you could create a class 
that does the syntax processing for you.  Having a VMS call to process 
a filename — somewhat akin to what a call such as LIB$TRIM_FILESPEC can 
provide for trimming the name — would be nice, as that would avoid 
folks making syntax mistakes.  But then there are other approaches — 
with a fast full-text search tool and a mildly-competent database 
design for the data and the page linkages (and probably the page 
revision history, if you're also keeping that), who cares what the 
individual data blobs are named?  It'd also be nice if VMS had file 
tagging, whether via ACE or otherwise.  Attach your "special" tagging 
data there and maybe the source URL and the date the data was acquired 
there, rather than overloading the filename.  With a path to your 
metadata, all you probably really care about with the filename is that 
it's unique, after all.


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