# Of Spaces, Underscores and Dashes

**URL:** <https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/of-spaces-underscores-and-dashes/835>\
**Category:** blog\
**Created:** [April 26, 2006, 12:00am UTC](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/of-spaces-underscores-and-dashes/835 "2006-04-26T00:00:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 26

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**Author:** ![Ken](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v2/letter/k/cc9497/32.png) [@Ken](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/u/Ken)\
**Post date:** [March 12, 2008, 12:00am UTC](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/of-spaces-underscores-and-dashes/835/26 "2008-03-12T00:00:00Z")

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Sometimes you don’t get to pick your tools, and they have bugs that make use of spaces problematic. Try calling a post-build script from Visual C++ 6 with an argument that contains a space, for example. Not possible.

A space in a filename is generally a clue that you need to add a level of directory hierarchy. Instead of “My Documents”, use “Documents/Mine”. Instead of “2008 Acme Invoices”, try “Invoices/Acme/2008”. Spaces are semantic separators in English. In directory hierarchies, the equivalent token is the slash/backslash.

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