Filename character restrictions

Filenames in Trainz assets are heavily restricted for compatibility reasons. As filenames are not displayed to end-users, there is no requirement for localization support or other formatting characters. Specifically, filenames within Trainz must obey the following rules:

• Filenames must not begin with a space (' '), a period ('.'), or a tilde ('~').
• Filenames must be at least one character long.
• Filenames must consist of the following ASCII characters only:
  • 'a' through 'z'
  • '0' through '9'
  • hyphen ('-')
  • ampersand ('&')
  • comma (',')
  • plus ('+')
  • apostrophe (' ' ')
  • period ('.')
  • underscore ('_')
  • dollar ('$')
  • space (' ')
  • open parenthesis ('(')
  • closed parenthesis (')')
  • tilde ('~')
• Filenames must not end with a space (' ').
• Filenames should be kept to a reasonable length. No fixed length is currently enforced, however if compatibility issues arise at a later date we may begin enforcing length limits.
• Smart quotes, accents, umlauts and other non-ASCII characters are disallowed.