Chapter 23 pages 345 to 346 of the Final Cut Pro 7 user manual described how and why to avoid special charcters extremely well:
Avoiding Special Characters
The most conservative filenaming conventions provide the most cross-platform compatibility. This means that your filenames will work in different operating systems, such as Mac OS X and other UNIX-based operating systems, Mac OS 9, and Windows. You also need to consider filenaming when you transfer files via the Internet, where you can never be certain what computer platform your files may be stored on, even if temporarily.
Avoid file separators
- : (colon)
- / (slash)
- \ (backslash)
You cannot use colons in the names of files and folders because Mac OS 9 (Classic) uses this character to separate directories in pathnames. In addition, some applications may not allow you to use slashes in the names of items. These characters are directory separators for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and DOS (Windows) respectively.
Avoid Special characters not included in your native alphabet
These characters may not be supported or may be difficult to work with when exported to other applications.
Avoid punctuation marks, parentheses, quotation marks, brackets, and operators
- . , [ ] { } ( ) ! ; “ ` * ? < > |
These characters are often used in scripting and programming languages.
Avoid white space characters such as spaces, tabs, new lines, and carriage returns (the last two are uncommon)
White space is handled differently in different programming languages and operating systems, so certain processing scripts and applications may treat your files differently than expected. The most conservative filenames avoid all use of white space characters, and use the underscore (_) character instead.
Keep the filename short, use all lowercase, use only letters in the alphabet (that is, a to z) and/or numbers, don't use special characters, and no spaces (that is, use underscore "_" instead of a space).
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