How to strip illegal characters before trying to save filenames?

Question

I was able to find how to use the GetInvalidFileNameChars() method in a PowerShell script. However, it seems to also filter out whitespace (which is what I DON

Answer 1

I suspect it has to do with non-display characters being coerced to [string] for the regex operation (and ending up expressed as spaces).

See if this doesn't work better:

([char[]]$name | where { [IO.Path]::GetinvalidFileNameChars() -notcontains $_ }) -join ''

That will do a straight char comparison, and seems to be more reliable (embedded spaces are not removed).

$name = 'abc*\ def.txt'
([char[]]$name | where { [IO.Path]::GetinvalidFileNameChars() -notcontains $_ }) -join ''

abc def.txt

Edit - I believe @Ansgar is correct about the space being caused by casting the character array to string. The space is being introduced by $OFS.