Youtube: Issue with "youtube-dl -t" and blanks in filename - no underscores since update

[ghost]

I installed youtube-dl with MacPorts. Did a "port upgrade outdated" and now I see that there are whitespaces in file name. In earlier version was underscore _

> youtube-dl --version
2012.12.11

> youtube-dl -t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vLnfWT9wQ8
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] 9vLnfWT9wQ8: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] 9vLnfWT9wQ8: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] 9vLnfWT9wQ8: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: Puppy's First Christmas-9vLnfWT9wQ8.mp4
[download] 100.0% of 39.08M at    1.69M/s ETA 00:00

> ls -al Puppy*
-rw-r--r--  1 Peter  staff  40979259 Dec 24 23:14 Puppy's First Christmas-9vLnfWT9wQ8.mp4

Whitespaces are really bad for UNIX like OSes.

[phihag]

This is intentional. I have no idea why whitespaces should be bad for Unix, could you elaborate? They work just fine on my Linux box.

In any case, you can pass --restrict-filenames to restrict the filename characters to a more limited set. If you want that all the time, just add /etc/youtube-dl.conf or ~/.local/config/youtube-dl.conf with the contents --restrict-filenames.

[ghost]

Whiespaces and other special characters

# pound < left angle bracket    $ dollar sign   + plus sign
% percent   > right angle bracket   ! exclamation point ` backtick
& ampersand * asterisk  ‘ single quotes   | pipe
{ left bracket  ? question mark “ double quotes   = equal sign
} right bracket / forward slash : colon  
\ back slash    blank spaces    @ at sign

need quoting in UNIX.

Jeff Atwood wrote http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/04/of-spaces-underscores-and-dashes.html:

I try to avoid using spaces in filenames and URLs. They're great for human readability, but they're remarkably inconvenient in computer resource locators:

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Atwood for more info about Jeff Atwood.

why is it intentional? why you include blanks?

[phihag]

No, they don't, you can call fopen("white space") just fine. Some of these characters need to be escaped in various places in a POSIX-compatible shell. Any modern interactive shell will do the quoting for you - simply press Tab or use placeholders.

While underscores instead of spaces are fairly readable, the other replacements are not. I'd very much prefer a title <script> - "security" in .coms.mp4 than _script__-__security__in_.coms.mp4. Therefore, we decided (after a lot of requests for spaces in file names) to have the file name as plainly as possible, without any rewriting, and add the aforementioned --restrict-filenames option for people on systems that cannot handle the glory of plain filenames.

[njsg]

Count this as one more request against spaces in file names. While it is possible to use almost every character in a file name, I still prefer to avoid anything far from lowercase ASCII, including blanks.