SABnzbd Forums

Version: 4.3
OS: Windows XP SP3
Install-type: Windows zip
Skin (if applicable): Plush
Firewall Software: None
Are you using IPV6? no
Is the issue reproducible? yes

I really enjoy using this program, I've completely stopped using NewsPro for binary downloads, but there are a couple behaviors I would like to be able to change or see improved if this is possible. This applies to .nzb files from Newzbin (mostly TV shows) that are then renamed

1) Renaming of characters not supported by Windows file names. Most commonly this is the ":" (Colon) character. Current behavior seems to be to change all instances of ":" to "_" (underscore) I would really like if there was an option to select what the user would like characters to be replaced with, if at all. Personally, I would like to be able to tell the program to just ignore these characters, so that "Text: Subtext" would become "Text Subtext," or to replace with the character of my choice, so I could tell it to output "Text- Subtext" or "Text; Subtext" instead of "Text_ Subtext"

2) Related to the above issue, the colon character never shows up in the History or Que correctly. For example, "Text: Subtext" will show up in history or que as "Text_ Subtext" Whatever the behavior for actually renaming the character in the file system is, I would really like it to show up in the History and Que with the correct title. I use the "SabTab2 for Newzbin" greasemonkey script, which helps to filter out Newzbin posts the user has already downloaded by changing their color to grey. It does this by checking the Newzbin post title against the History and Que in SABnzbd, so when a character in the history or que is changed, the match fails.

3) Handling of the "'" character (Apostrophe) is currently to change it to a "-" (dash). I'm not sure why this is, since the apostrophe is a valid Windows file name character and the apostrophe sometimes shows up correctly in the title of the download in SABnzbd's history and que (I think it shows up correctly for show titles but not for the episode names). I would like to have the renamer leave the apostrophe intact instead of replacing it with a dash.

4) Handling of long titles. After a certain amount of characters, SABnzbd truncates the file name and inserts a number. Example, the post on Newzbin with title "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - 4x03 - America’s Next Top Paddy’s Billboard Model Contest" became "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - 4x03 - America-s Next Top Paddy-s [22237576]" (Also note the above described problem with apostrophe characters. The apostrophe in the show title was left intact, but the apostrophies in the episode title were replaced with dashes.)

I hope there is a fix or workaround for these problems. I really appreciate that you guys are offering a free and open source product that far outshines all the commercial Usenet binary downloaders out there. I've been using Usenet for 12 years now and I never imagined it could ever be as good as this.

1. We will not make it user-definable; we have enough crazy options already.
However, translation to alike  characters would be better than mapping everything to underscores.
(So: ":" --> ";" and "'" to "`", etc.)
Afterwards you have your own script do the fine-tuning.

2. We show the same title the same way as the (converted) filename.

3. I don't think single quote is translated to dash, but to underscore.
Part of SABnzbd depends on command line parameters, escpecially passing parameters to the user script.
Quotes are used to allow names with embedded spaces.
This is the reason single quote is replaced, although for Windows it's not strictly required.
(We use the same mapping for all Operating Systems).

4. SABnzbd does not truncate titles (although it should). I think it's newzbin that truncates the title.
The title you see in newzbin.com is not equal to the filename that newzbin sends to SABnzbd.
I suspect that newzbin also does the single quote to dash translation.

Personally I think replacing : with ; looks terrible and is also confusing. Isn't it also a depreciated character for folder naming?
I think : should just be removed from the folder name, anyone else agree?

switch wrote: Personally I think replacing : with ; looks terrible and is also confusing. Isn't it also a depreciated character for folder naming?

Code: Select all

C:\Downloads\Some Title; Subtitle\

I think : should just be removed from the folder name, anyone else agree?

That's actually exactly what I want to do personally, but I can see how other users might want to replace it with something else.