How to Name a File

Naming a file, while seemingly an easy task has a number of nuances to it.  Here are some tips to improve your file naming.

A rose by any other name, would smell just as sweet but would be more difficult to locate.

Use all lowercase letters

A combination of upper and lowercase letters in a file name makes for easy typos in urls.  Windows servers by default are case-insensitive but the W3C standards group says urls should be case-sensitive and this is the behavior on most *nix servers.

Minus signs instead of spaces or underscores

Spaces in urls get encoded to %20, which makes for messy and confusing urls so we replace them with a character.  Underscores can get lost when a filename is underlined so minus signs are used in place of spaces.

Dates

If you need to include a date, please:

• put the date at the beginning of the file name
• use the format YEAR-MONTH-DAY
• use 4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day

examples:

2014-12-25-example-file.pdf

2014-07-31-example-file.pdf

One of the advantages of this format is, when sorting alphabetically these files will be chronological.

Note: The official name for this date format is International Date Standard ISO8601.

Photo credit Quinn Dombrowski

Sal Ferrarello (@salcode)

Sal is a PHP developer with a focus on the WordPress platform. He is a conference speaker with a background including Piano Player, Radio DJ, Magician/Juggler, Beach Photographer, and High School Math Teacher. Sal can be found professionally at WebDevStudios, where he works as a senior backend engineer.