Please add a switch to trim filename to specific character count

Checklist

• I’m reporting a feature request
• I’ve verified that I’m running youtube-dl version 2021.03.14
• I’ve searched the bugtracker for similar feature requests including closed ones

Description

WRITE DESCRIPTION HERE If you try to download a file that’s over 250 characters, the download will fail, so can you please add a switch that would trim the file name (excluding the extension) to a specific amount of characters to prevent this from happening? E.g., --trim-filename 7 to trim, e.g., this is the original filename.mp4 to this is.mp4 Certain forks have already done this (https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc/issues/85), so maybe it can even be carried over, but it would mean a loooot.

[rautamiekka]

Good to know. 😃 Can you explain what the “.” does in .7s? Does it tell it to match until it sees a “.” character and to match only upto x number of characters? I did look at the Python string formatting page, but it was kind of confusing (and I do know a bit of Python, but I’ve never used formatting like that). Are there any other examples you can think of that could be useful? I know you can pad numbers like %(number)03d, etc.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#old-string-formatting explains the dot as

5. Precision (optional), given as a '.' (dot) followed by the precision. If specified as '*' (an asterisk), the actual precision is read from the next element of the tuple in values, and the value to convert comes after the precision.

I tested it in an IPython console:

>>> print(
...    "%(title).7s" % {"title":"test0123456789"}
... )
test012
>>> print(
...     "%(title)7s" % {"title":"test0123456789"}
... )
test0123456789

So yeah, the .7s means the incoming value for title is converted into string max 7 chars long.

[ns-studios]

@garoto Thank you so so so much! I’ve always wanted this, but didn’t realize it was there all along.