Delimiter for meta data in Windows file name

Question

I'm working on maintenance of an application that transfers a file to another system and uses a structured filename to include meta data including a language code. The current app uses a two character language code and a dash/hyphen for a delimiter.

Ex. Canada-EN-ProdName-ProdCode.txt

I'm converting it to use IETF language code and so the dash delimiter won't do and need a replacement. I'm trying to determine a delimiter to avoid future errors and am considering the tilde ~.

Ex. Canada~en-GB~ProdName~ProdCode.txt

This will be use only on Windows Sever 2003 + systems. I certainly didn't come up with this system of parsing a filename to get meta data. Unfortunately, I can't include this in the file itself and the destination system is expecting the language code to be in IETF format with the dash.

Any thoughts on potential issues with using the tilde in the filename, or perhaps a better character to use? I'm just looking for a second opinion in case I'm overlooking a possible failure. I believe windows will use the tilde when shortening a long filename to 8.3 format, but I don't see that as an issue here as the OSs can handle lang filenames.

Answer 1

The tilde is probably fine, but what's wrong with the good old underscore _ ? It has no special meaning on either windows or unix, and makes names that are relatively easy to read. If there are no other special considerations, I would avoid the tilde solely out of paranoia, since windows does use it as a special character sometimes, as you mentioned.