Issues with configuring virtual folders

[mik_s]

I managed to get virtual folders set up to combine files from accross several drives into a couple of folders in UMS. I did have trouble setting the paths correctly as all slashes have to be doubled up like "C:\\Shows\\" (might be / instead if \ though, not at home atm so can't check my config) I don't know why but there must be a technical reason, sonething about java syntax I think.

Use the example virtual folder as a guide but from memory should look something like this, but is probably incorrect.

Code: Select all

	{"Movies";
		{"C:\\movies\\","D:\\more movies\\","E:\\even more movies\\"}
	};
	{"Shows";
		{"C:\\shows\\","D:\\my shows\\","F:\\Wifes shows\\"}
	};	

[Nadahar]

The reason for the double backslashes is the "format" which is called Java Properties files. They aren't UTF-8, so all non ASCII (or really non Latin1 I think) characters must be written in the form "\uxxxx". Because of this, and the fact that you can specify special characters like newline as "\n", means that "\" has a special meaning. The backslash is the so-called "escape character". As is often the case, the escape character itself must be escaped for it to be represented as a "literal character" instead of just the escape character. As a consequence, all "\" characters must be written "\\".

This means that to be able to enter a Windows UNC path for example (which always starts with "\\"), you must actually write "\\\\". But, it gets worse. Some places in the configuration files you can use regular expressions. Regular expressions also use "\" as the escape character, if you want to specify a backslash inside a regular expression in such a configuration file, you must actually write "\\\\". To specify the start of a UNC path in a regular expression, you thus have to type "\\\\\\\\". Enjoy

Edit: When thinking of it, I don't think the virtual folders configuration file is a "properties file". From the excerpt posted above, it looks like JSON. Regardless, the same escape mechanism applies for JSON as for "properties files": https://www.json.org/json-en.html