Colon/Asterisk as a filename delimiter?

Question

I'm looking for a character to use a filename delimiter (I'm storing multiple filenames in a plaintext string). Windows seems not to allow :, ?, *, <, >, ", |, / and \ in filenames. Obviously, \ and / can't be used, since they mean something within a path. Is there any reason why any of those others shouldn't be used? I'm just thinking that, similar to / or \, those other disallowed characters may have special meaning that I shouldn't assume won't be in path names. Of those other 7 characters, are any definitely safe or definitely unsafe to use for this purpose?

Answer 1

The characters : and " are also used in paths. Colon is the drive unit delimiter, and quotation marks are used when spaces are part of a folder or file name.

The charactes * and ? are used as wildcards when searching for files.

The characters < and > are used for redirecting an application's input and output to and from a file.

The character | is used for piping output from one application into input of another application.

I would choose the pipe character for separating file names. It's not used in paths, and its shape has a natural separation quality to it.

An alternative could be to use XML in the string. There is a bit of overhead and some characters need encoding, but the advantage is that it can handle any characters and the format is self explanatory and well defined.