Two Different Files With the Same Name

Bug graveyard
1

I don’t think this is a duplicate topic. I looked and did not see anything.

I currently have two files that have the exact same name which I know Obsidian isn’t suppose to allow. I copied the name from one file to the other expecting to get a warning, but I didn’t. So I have two files with this name: β How To Take Smart Notes (Card). I’m going ahead and deleting one of them because I’m trying to set up a standard way of doing things for myself and if I don’t take care of it now, I’ll forget to do it later and then when I find the file, I’ll get confused about why I did what I did.

Also, just as an experiment, I went ahead and did a duplicate of the one I’m deleting and Obs did add the number 1 to it to make it different from its original file.

2

Are the files in the same directory?

Not only obsidian does not allow it, but your os should not allow it (in the same directory)

Are sure they have the same filename, maybe it looks the same but it is different?

Can you put the files in a zip file and attach it here?

3

At one point, this happened to me too. The common factor with the OP was a special (accented) character, and I just assumed it had something to do with it. As I understand it, there is some unicode trickery that makes it possible for two equal characters to be represented by two different code points.

4

ok, so it looks like it’s the same filename but it’s not the same filename.

5

If you anyone has a reproducible example, please post it.

6

They were in the same directory. Unfortunately, I can’t send a zipped file because I deleted one of them.

7

I don’t have any examples at the moment, but you may find it useful to revisit the attachment in this bug report that I filed when Obsidian was still in version 7.x.

My theory is that whatever was responsible for that discrepancy inside text files, is also causing it in file names.

8

Let me try again. The discrepancy is correct. If the characters are copied\entered using different Unicode chars, they are different and should be threated as different. No matter if they look similar. Therefore, the OS and Obsidian are correct to treat them differently.

9

Interesting…hmmm. So if I use a particular character using Word’s symbols I should always use that particular character from Word itself instead of pasting it into an Obs note and copying it from one note to another to avoid the same name on a note title? (I hope this makes sense.)

10

No, this is not a matter of using word or obsidian. Both Obsidian, Word and your OS support Unicode chars.

Internally in a computer characters are represented as numbers (A=0041). The problem is that some characters (glyphs to be precise) have multiple numbers corresponding to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_characters_in_Unicode

From the POV of the computer\word\obsidian, they are different characters.

11

I see. Well, I will just have to pay attention to what I’m doing then.