The VideoLAN Forums

Hey everyone!

I'm guessing this is a bug:
In a M3U playlist, any relative path that contains a square bracket (opening or closing) can't be loaded, e.g.: However, if the path is absolute, it works: It also works if I URL-encode the square bracket as %5B and %5D (in the M3U, not the file on disk).

Before anyone asks: no, I'm not going to modify all affected playlists or rename the actual files, because they work for every other player I'm using - and have been working for VLC in the past, too.

I've been able to reproduce this on Windows, Linux and Android and even sifted through the source to see if I catch anything that might cause this, but no dice. Can anyone help me with this?

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=151929
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=153592
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=152080

Thanks for the links - I did a search before posting, but all three of those topics escaped me somehow.
Anyway, looks like this has been a known problem for at least an entire year. None of the developers use square brackets in their filenames, I guess

From my experience, it only takes the right person a couple of minutes to spot the bug in the code - finding the right person and making them look into the issue is the actual hard part.

[Edit] Nevermind, I just found this bug report (3 years old and still open). It's exactly this problem.
Looking at the discussion that unfolded there over the years, I can only say, I wholeheartedly agree with the last comment from "unidarrio" - I don't see why a non-issue like this should be offloaded on the user without reasonable explanation or any help in resolving the problem.

In a nutshell: if it works literally everywhere else, it should also work in VLC.

Sorry if that sounded frustrated, but that's because I AM. I'm just a guy trying to listen to music on his phone and VLC is now making this much more complicated than it should be.

In a nutshell: if it works literally everywhere else, it should also work in VLC.

I know.

Sorry if that sounded frustrated, but that's because I AM.

So am I.