Filename Sanitizer

Prepare safer portable filenames without altering file contents.

Filenames — one per line

Replacement

Character mode

ReadyReserved characters < > : " / \ | ? * and control characters are replaced; trailing dots/spaces are removed.

File handling notes

connects ZIP creation/extraction, archive inspection, GZIP, TAR/TAR.GZ extraction, ZIP merging, multi-ZIP extraction, splitting/joining, duplicate detection, renaming, folder summaries, file inventories, and file-type inspection without requiring a file upload where the browser APIs support the task.

Archive and safety boundaries

Browser memory can limit very large files. TAR extraction supports ordinary TAR/USTAR regular files and directories rather than every PAX/sparse/link edge case. Password-protected or uncommon ZIP compression methods can exceed JSZip support. Normalized download paths do not grant arbitrary filesystem write access.

Usage notes optional

Sanitizing characters does not make a path safe by itself

A cleaned filename can still collide with another file, exceed a filesystem limit, use a reserved device name, or become dangerous when joined with an untrusted directory path. Treat path traversal and extraction policy as separate checks.

Choose rules for the destination filesystem

Windows, macOS, Linux, cloud object storage, archives, and web downloads have different restrictions and normalization behavior. Preserve a mapping from original to cleaned names when batch-renaming so collisions and reversibility can be reviewed before files are moved.

Plan for collisions before a batch rename

Two distinct originals can sanitize to the same output after punctuation removal, case folding, whitespace collapse, or Unicode normalization. That is especially common when files come from different operating systems. Before renaming or extracting a large batch, compare the entire cleaned list for duplicates and decide a deterministic suffix policy. Keeping an original-to-cleaned mapping makes rollback and troubleshooting much safer.

Length limits apply after the folder path is added

A filename that is valid by itself can still exceed a destination path limit once nested folders are included. Long extensions, multibyte Unicode characters, synchronization clients, and archive extractors can impose additional constraints, so test representative full paths when transferring a large batch.