Validating Sharepoint filenames on upload

Some characters are legal for FAT or NTFS files but illegal for files in Sharepoint documentlibraries. Using the regular upload UI for Sharepoint you'll encounter a rather unpleasant validation error when uploading a file with funky characters. Using the object model will give you a good ole' exception.

I've seen a lot of approaches to solving this problem, and implemented a couple myself. Last night I noticed a method on the SPEncode static class that enabled a clean approach to the problem:

private string CleanFileName(string dirtyFileName)

{

    char[] dirtyChars = dirtyFileName.ToCharArray();

    foreach (char c in dirtyChars)

    {

        if (!SPEncode.IsLegalCharInUrl(c))

        {

            dirtyFileName = dirtyFileName.Replace(c.ToString(), "");

        }

    }

    return dirtyFileName; // now clean:-)

}