What is the illegal character used in seperator between artist and title ???

I often copy/paste "artist - title" for file names etc.. but seems there is an illegal character (or some strange character) in the seperator that causes problems with some file-parsing systems

why can't this seperator just be a "-" ???

It must be quite new, I've noticed it a few weeks ago as well.
It has nothing to do with the n-dash: – This dash is there since a couple years already, and it causes no problems what so ever (unless you're still using an operating system version which should have self-destructed over a decade ago, originally sold by a company which rhymes with Schmicrosoft).

The offending invisible character is apparently "Left-To-Right Mark", U+200E, & #8206;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-to-right_mark
It should not be there, I guess.

It's been there for some time, probably more than a year that I have had to copy paste to filename, and then delete offending character

dansauk
It's been there for some time, probably more than a year that I have had to copy paste to filename, and then delete offending character

Actually you may be right. The first time I have noticed an invisible character was quite some time ago as well, when copy/pasting the whole string e.g. into Google search field.

But in was only a couple of weeks or months ago when I noticed that copy/pasting the string e.g. to a downloaded image file name also breaks some of my offline AppleScripts and Automator actions which I'm using for renaming files or fetching certain file metadata or filesystem attributes into my offline database. That didn't happen earlier though, so likely there already was an invisible character for a long time, but possibly there's a different one that now. Just guessing though.

I believe this is there to solve formatting issues with mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text. What programs are you using that it causes problems with?

My main problem is with my batch MP3 converter.

When I record audio clips for my sale items, I copy and paste the "Artist - Title" into the save file box in Soundforge to save the WAV file, but when it comes to load the WAV's into the MP3 converter, the files don't appear if they contain this invalid character.

It's the same in other software too, I had problems in past, but can't remember what programs. Is just an inherent problem with Windows i believe.

In the marketplace "Inventory" list, this unicode character does not appear between Artist and Title. Seems only on release pages, and some other places.

same here with audacity when ripping my vinyls and being to lazy to type the titles myself.

nik
I believe this is there to solve formatting issues with mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text.

Obviously. :)

nik
What programs are you using that it causes problems with?

On Mac OS X (10.8.4) I don't think it affects anything "vital". Obviously it breaks some old AppleScripts which are still using the ancient (from the early 1990s) Disk:Path:To:Folder:To:File method to fetch a file path which is not really Unicode savvy, instead of the modern "robust" POSIX path method. Nothing big, such a script can be usually updated easily.

But the character also breaks online searches.
Including the Discogs search: http://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/522e08d54322464aeaea7446#522e67f9aba9e8350d6cc3d5

Example: Swiss Ebay site.
Interestingly, the international ebay.com seams to be more robust in that regard and finds the release right away…