I'm building a music player that uses readsf~ many of the files have spaces in the names and readsf~ will not open a file with spaces in the filename.

Previously I was using soundfiler and tabplay~ this combination had no problem with the spaces but would not play very long files in their entirety. I tried the maxsize command but still was unable to play all of a 20min file.

The names of my audio files are displayed on a screen. Replacing the spaces with underscores works but is ugly. It also requires the renaming of all the files.

is it possible to swap one character with another within puredata?

I presume the only other way is to create a list of track titles and use that for my display, However I'd like to avoid hardcoding this.

I only use filenames without spaces, because this kind of problems. If it is only for displaying there probably are solusions. What are you using for displaying? Canvas names? -> there you can not use spaces as far as I know. Or Symbol boxes? -> there it is possible to use spaces.
What system are you on? With my System (OSX 10.11) it is possible to feed [readsf~] names with spaces.
my test looked like this: test_readsf_tmp.pd

@soapdodger You can use this abstraction to generate symbols containing spaces, which work with [readsf~] as filenames and should also work as labels for canvas to display the file names and everywhere else as well: message2symbol.zip

This for example opens and plays "bird test.wav" in the directory of the patch:

Well, i have to say, it is possible to use a symbol containing spaces as a label for canvas, but it will not save the part after the first space, it will loose all the other canvas properties like size and color after saving and reopening and it will give an ugly tcl error when opening the canvas properties window. So this is a bug and should only be used with care and for temporal information

this does work for displaying messages including spaces too (i also get the errors mentioned by @ingox):

and on windows i can open files with spaces with [readsf~] too.

a bit off-topic: and this is a nice way to convert symbols to lists while the example above converts lists to symbols.

just discovered recently that [fudiformat] and [fudiparse] are part of pd vanilla for some time.