Illegal characters in IFTTT tags

cjdshaw

I'm surprised that nobody else has flagged this, but a common use for IFTTT / Dropbox is:

 

IF

some event happens or data becomes available

THEN

log or download it to a file in Dropbox, named for when it happened

 

Most triggers include a {{CreatedAt}} or {{OccurredAt}} tag to allow this, but it's usually in a readable format like

April 7, 2020 at 01:31PM

or

07/04/2020, 01:31pm

 

This means that the created Dropbox files don't sort properly, and contain illegal characters for Windows. Could the Dropbox actions provide their own ingredients? Like

{{ISO8601time}} 2020-04-07T123100Z

{{FilenameFriendlyTime}} 2020-04-07_13-31

 

or at the very least, offer an option to sanitise incoming filenames to convert illegal characters to underscores

Greg-DB

That sounds like something that would need to be implemented in the IFTTT code that connects to Dropbox, so I recommend sharing this request with IFTTT. (We do have some information on incompatible characters in the help center in case it helps.)