Re: How to convert an arbitrary string into a filename

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2023-04-26, at 07:42, Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Apr 2023 at 10:56, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
>
>> given an arbitrary string, say "Hello, world!!!", I want to have
>> a filename with all the runs of weird characters (that is,
>> non-alphanumeric ones) converted to dashes (say, "Hello-world").  Is
>> there a function for that in Emacs already or should I write my own?
>
> It looks like you want to generate file names for blog posts or
> articles so that URLs look pretty. While a useful goal, the mechanic

Nice try;-), but no, my use case is different.

> you ask for is lossy, so multiple titles could map into the same file
> name, which, in the worst case, could lead to data loss, or require
> disambiguation of some kind.

I am well aware of that - I don't care about lossiness, and I have ways
to combat ambiguity (the "slug" would only be one of several parts of
the filename).

> (Also, depending on how wide your audience is and what your
> implementation’s definition of alphanumeric is, it might turn titles
> written in non-Latin-based scripts into an empty string, and fixing
> that might be moderately easy for some scripts (e.g. Greek, Cyrillic)
> and hard for others (e.g. CJK).)

My audience is exactly one person, so again - not a problem.  (Though
I /will/ blog about it at some point, and then it's possible that
someone might have to adapt the code.)

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl