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Forum Discussion
cjdshaw
5 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Illegal characters in IFTTT tags
I'm surprised that nobody else has flagged this, but a common use for IFTTT / Dropbox is:
IF
some event happens or data becomes available
THEN
log or download it to a file in Dropbox, named for when it happened
Most triggers include a {{CreatedAt}} or {{OccurredAt}} tag to allow this, but it's usually in a readable format like
April 7, 2020 at 01:31PM
or
07/04/2020, 01:31pm
This means that the created Dropbox files don't sort properly, and contain illegal characters for Windows. Could the Dropbox actions provide their own ingredients? Like
{{ISO8601time}} 2020-04-07T123100Z
{{FilenameFriendlyTime}} 2020-04-07_13-31
or at the very least, offer an option to sanitise incoming filenames to convert illegal characters to underscores
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
That sounds like something that would need to be implemented in the IFTTT code that connects to Dropbox, so I recommend sharing this request with IFTTT. (We do have some information on incompatible characters in the help center in case it helps.)
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