Tuesday, November 22, 2005

List of Invalid Keyboard Characters for a Windows XP filename

What keyboard characters are not valid for a Windows XP filename?

This has come up several times over the years during my programming tasks when I have tried to automatically generate a filename based on some collection of data. It seems a good time to document this relatively simple question for my future reference as well as yours.

The keyboard characters that cannot be used in a Windows XP filename are:

* Asterisk

Pipe (vertical bar)

\ Back slash

/ Forward slash

: Colon

" Quote

< Less Than

> Greater Than

? Question mark


Hope that helps!
Joe Kunk