# Safe characters for Linux-Windows crossplataform synchronizing?
**URL:** https://forum.syncthing.net/t/safe-characters-for-linux-windows-crossplataform-synchronizing/8572
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [November 9, 2016, 11:46am UTC](https://forum.syncthing.net/t/safe-characters-for-linux-windows-crossplataform-synchronizing/8572 "2016-11-09T11:46:34Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@xabih](https://forum.syncthing.net/u/xabih)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 11:46am UTC](https://forum.syncthing.net/t/safe-characters-for-linux-windows-crossplataform-synchronizing/8572/1 "2016-11-09T11:46:34Z")
Hi all.
I’m planning to sync my music collection between Linux-Windows machines. I’m affraid of getting character incompatibilities between plataforms, particularly spanish characters like ñ and accent marks.
I can first of all rename the files to avoid this incompatibilities but I don’t really know what characters are safe, Is there any list of safe crossplataform characters?
Thanks in advance.
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### Author:  [@calmh](https://forum.syncthing.net/u/calmh)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 12:46pm UTC](https://forum.syncthing.net/t/safe-characters-for-linux-windows-crossplataform-synchronizing/8572/2 "2016-11-09T12:46:26Z")
All word characters of all languages are safe, as long as you use UTF-8 encoding on both sides. This is the default for many (most?) installations, probably all modern Unixes, Windows and Macs, but there are systems with legacy encodings that may confuse Syncthing, especially in Asia.
Apart from that, Windows has a bunch of extra restrictions on file names. They can’t include any of [these](https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/blob/master/lib/model/rwfolder.go#L1570) characters, can’t end in space, can’t be called `nul`, `com0` and a bunch of other reserved things.
Stay away from those and use UTF-8 everywhere and you should be fine.
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### Author:  [@spectras](https://forum.syncthing.net/u/spectras)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 5:34pm UTC](https://forum.syncthing.net/t/safe-characters-for-linux-windows-crossplataform-synchronizing/8572/3 "2016-11-09T17:34:10Z")
> [@calmh](#):
>
> as long as you use UTF-8 encoding on both sides
Do you mean that syncthing does NFD / NFC / NFKD / NFKC normalization? Otherwise you can certainly expect issues.
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### Author:  [@AudriusButkevicius](https://forum.syncthing.net/u/AudriusButkevicius)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2016, 9:35pm UTC](https://forum.syncthing.net/t/safe-characters-for-linux-windows-crossplataform-synchronizing/8572/4 "2016-11-09T21:35:14Z")
I think it deals with NFC NFD
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### Author:  [@calmh](https://forum.syncthing.net/u/calmh)
#### Post date: [November 10, 2016, 5:54am UTC](https://forum.syncthing.net/t/safe-characters-for-linux-windows-crossplataform-synchronizing/8572/5 "2016-11-10T05:54:37Z")
Yes, we do normalization for the host operating system (essentially NFD for Mac and NFC everywhere else).
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### Author:  [@system](https://forum.syncthing.net/u/system)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2016, 6:09am UTC](https://forum.syncthing.net/t/safe-characters-for-linux-windows-crossplataform-synchronizing/8572/6 "2016-12-10T06:09:35Z")
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