Issue importing CSV worklists due to long file names

[Oleksandr]

Hi all,

I’ve encountered an issue in our lab workflow and was hoping someone might have experience with this.

Our system automatically generates CSV files (example attached). We have thousands of these files that need to be processed. The problem seems to be related to the file name length and special characters.

When trying to use “Import Worklist” , I get the following error:

Invalid name
plate_1138-1[NO-2D-11148,NO-2D-11149,NO-2D-11151,NO-2D-11153,NO-2D-11154,NO-2D-11155,NO-2D-11156,NO-2D-11157,NO-2D-11163,NO-2D-11164,NO-2D-11166].csv
Make sure it does not contain invalid characters or punctuation and that it is not too long.

When trying to Open File , I receive this error:

The Microsoft Jet database engine could not find the object
plate_1138-[NO-2D-11148,NO-2D-11149,NO-2D-11151,NO-2D-11153,NO-2D-11154,NO-2D-11155,NO-2D-11156,NO-2D-11157,NO-2D-11163,NO-2D-11164,NO-2D-11166].txt
Make sure the object exists and that its name and path are specified correctly.

If I manually rename the file and make the name shorter, it works without any problems. However, since we have thousands of these files, renaming them every time is not really practical.

I was wondering if anyone has encountered a similar issue or knows a workaround for handling such file names. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

plate_1138-1(NO-2D-11148,NO-2D-11149,NO-2D-11151,NO-2D-11153,NO-2D-11154,NO-2D-11155,NO-2D-11156,NO-2D-11157,NO-2D-11163,NO-2D-11164,NO-2D-11166).csv

[PatrickM]

I would really recommend keeping characters such as “,”, “[”, etc out of your filenames. Anything beyond “_” and “-”, really, because there is a number of signs that Windows will allow but which can lead to funky results somewhere downstream at some point.

As for filename lengths, you shouldn’t forget that a filename is the name of the file PLUS the path to it. With your examples, I’d say unless you store them directly on C:, you are probably beyond the limitations.

A workaround (beyond making the names shorter, which is the sensible approach but I realize that processes sometimes make this quite hard) is to open the files as ASCII and read them out line by line. Then you can split the line-string with, for example, the String library in Extensions and read out the arrays by index for the information you want. ASCII files have fewer limitations for character length.