How to design a macro to ... cleanse all macros of Dropbox and Mac OS forbidden characters?

[_jims]

@Nige_S

The macro's name is unimportant -- it's the exported/saved file's name that matters. So what you could do is "cleanse on save",

That's what Zip Smart Group(s) does when local_DropboxSafe = 1. Both the name of the macro groups and the macros are cleansed (a.k.a. sanitized).

@Nige_S

For true portability, limit yourself to a-zA-Z0-9, _, - and ., and never start nor end the name with .. Anything outside that character set could cause trouble somehow, somewhere, so you may as well avoid it now. It also makes things easier programmatically -- replace all spaces with _ and anything that's not in that character set with -,

IMO, to be this conservative, would be overkill particularly with trends moving in support of unicode. But if I was arguing this conservative position, I'd even avoid -.

@Nige_S

test for uniqueness and, if necessary, start incrementing the name (eg name-1.text, name-2.txt) until unique.

macOS, Keyboard Maestro export commands, and Zip Smart Group(s) increment as follows to avoid collisions:

abc.txt
abc 2.txt
abc 3.txt

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@ronald, if you so inclined to cleanse your macros and macro groups within the Keyboard Maestro editor, there are shell script functions within Zip Smart Group(s) that could be used in combination with macro renaming steps. Note again, I'm not suggesting you do that, but if you are really motivated to do so, that shell logic could be a start.