YouTube and the Ampersand

[DuckPaddle]

YouTube frequently includes ampersands in their Video IDs, crucial for transcript processing. However, these ampersands pose challenges within shell processing. I am not an experienced pipeline worker so please feel free to point out the obvious if I have missed something in my research.

To mitigate this issue, I propose requiring users to encapsulate Video IDs in quotation marks. This practice prevents the shell from misinterpreting the ampersand as a meta command.

Unfortunately, my attempts to automate this process have failed. The shell processes gets the command line before my code can intervene, resulting in error messages when users omit the required quotation marks.

Given the nasty error messages when the user forgets the quote marks, does this approach seem reasonable?