HTML: how to use a href to link to a file name that starts with # character

Question

I have many text files, the name of which starts with # (hash) sign. It would be very cumbersome to rename the files.

If I try to link to the text files in an HTML file, using <a href="#example.txt"> the browser interprets the leading # character as a "fragment identifier".

My requirement is for the link to open the text file in the browser.

I have tried substituting the leading # character like this:

<a href="#35;example.txt"> 
<a href="#&23;example.txt">

but that does not work (the text file is not opened).

Is there an HTML work-around, or is JavaScript required for this?

Answer 1

Problem -

href with a # in front of the file name fails to load the file. This is because you need to URL Encode the symbol.

Solution -

Use %23 which is the URL Encoding for #.

Example -

If you want to use an href to link a file named #test.html, you would do this -

<a href="%23test.html">Click Me!</a>

Recommendation -

Do not use file names with # in the name.

If you want to rename all of the files in the directory you are working in, here is a bash script that will do that for you.

#!/bin/bash

target="/home/user/directory/change/$1"
for f in "$target"/*
do
    letter=$(basename $f | cut -c1-1)
    if [ "$letter" == "#" ]; then
        withoutHash=$(basename $f | cut -c 2-)
        mv  $f $withoutHash
    fi 
done

This bash script should be easy to understand but there is surely some one liner on Stack Overflow. Try setting up a test directory and playing with it. You could pretty easily figure out how to traverse sub directories if needed.