Replacing illegal characters in folder and file names?

[JimR]

When I posted a few weeks ago concerning problems regarding my Roberts iStream radio accessing MinimServer I was advised that the problem probably lay with ‘illegal’ characters in some of my folder and file names.

In an attempt to fix this I am planning to run a script this weekend that will munch through the file system renaming anything that has ‘dodgy’ characters. My script specifies a list of acceptable characters and, in each folder or filename it encounters, replaces any characters not on this list with a placeholder – currently an ‘x’. I am not overly concerned about any loss of intelligibility – the tags inside the files will not be altered.

I will back up everything twice first!

Is this a good plan? What characters are guaranteed to be legal across all uPnP/DLNA servers, control points and renderers? Is this documented somewhere?

All advice gratefully received.

Jim