Question Strange, though apparently trivial, glitch when using Robocopy

[pmv]

This doesn't seem to have any real consequences so it's not a real problem but it's just bugging me because I can't figure out what's going on.

I use a robocopy script to transfer my music library to my music player. It works, but the log it produces is puzzling me - it seems to see unprintable characters in some folder names - yet when I look at the source folders on the hard-drive the names are perfectly valid, and in any case the folders and contents are successfully copied to the device (where they also look perfectly OK).

Just that the log reports things like this:

New Dir 39 E:\MyAccount\My Music\MediaMonkey\Podcasts\?A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs\

Why is that "?" there?

Everything works OK, other than the log reports the copying of files in the wrong order, as that "?" messes-up the alphabetical ordering. It's just a bit puzzling, is all. I'm guessing it might have something to do with different character sets or something, and that "A" perhaps is not _really_ an "A"? As the destination is formatted FAT32, I have noticed that causing weird results with things like 'long hyphens' in file names, I assume it's something to do with that?

 

[pmv]

Oh well, retyping the name of the folder on the source disk seems to have solved it (though now it insists on recopying the entire directory when I do a sync, presumably because it thinks the name has "changed"). Seems that somehow either the "A" was a different kind of "A" or there was a mystery invisible character in there for some reason.

 

[mikeymikec]

I was trying to use a youtube-to-mp3 website yesterday, and I'm fairly sure the website was having a fit because the name of the YouTube clip had lots of oddness in it (UTF oddness I assume, like when the standard font the website uses is sans-serif but the UTF coding makes it display in serif), so when it attempted to serve up a file for me based on that name, it failed every time.