Create (sane/safe) filename from any (unsafe) string

Question

I want to create a sane/safe filename (i.e. somewhat readable, no \"strange\" characters, etc.) from some random Unicode string (mich might contain just anything).

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Answer 1

I admit there are two schools of thought regarding DIY vs dependencies. But I come from the firm school of thought that prefers not to reinvent wheels, and to see canonical approaches to simple tasks like this. To wit I am a fan of the pathvalidate library

https://pypi.org/project/pathvalidate/

Which includes a function sanitize_filename() which does what you're after.

I would preference this to any one of the numerous home baked solutions. In the ideal I'd like to see a sanitizer in os.path which is sensitive to filesystem differences and does not do unnecessary sanitising. I imagine pathvalidate takes the conservative approach and produces valid filenames that can span at least NTFS and ext4 comfortably, but it's hard to imagine it even bothers with old DOS constraints.