Underscores in names

[matt_ce]

Transitioning from a bespoke pipeline to Shotgun Toolkit, one thing that we’ve immediately found is the default restriction of not having underscores in names. I found this post from 2015 which explains why, but it’s going to be a very hard habit for many artists here to break.

The explanation sounds reasonable, but I guess before I try removing the alphanumeric restriction I wanted to ask if anyone knows how badly it might break things? Has anyone here allowed underscores, and lived to tell the tale?

Are there any avenues for mitigation, eg. replacing file path template underscores with something else like hyphens? I’m keen to stay as close to the default shotgun config as possible, but curious what the ramifications might be…

[philip.scadding]

Hi Matt

This is also similar to this topic I created.

How do I convert white spaces in entity names to underscores and not hyphens during folder creation?

If an entity has white space characters in its name, by default Toolkit will replace these characters with hyphens when creating folders and files. It’s not uncommon for us to get asked if it’s possible to replace white space characters with underscores instead. To which the answer is yes it’s possible but not normally advisable. The reason for this is that we use the _ character as a separator between template keys. As an example, if we had ...{asset}_{task}... in a template path, and if …

Replacing the _ with - as template key separators should work as well. To my knowledge, this should be fine, but I’ve not personally tested this in production.
Perhaps others have had some experience with this.

Thanks
Phil