# Fully-Qualified (FQ) Space Names

A fully-qualified name is a complete pathname that starts at the root space. It specifies a unique space in the tree. A typical FQ name is created by concatenating NQ names onto the name of the root space, delimiting each NQ name with the slash character “\”. For example, the fully-qualified name for space X in a tree with root A might be “A\B\C\X”.

The coordinate space tree always returns FQ names delimited with the “\” character, but it accepts either forward “/” or backward “\” slashes as a legal separator in input names. For convenience, the name “^” is considered to be an alias for the root space. Thus the following fully-qualified name is legal and equivalent to the previous example: “^\B\C\X”.

FQ names have two main advantages:

- They resolve potential ambiguities in the tree. For example, if a tree contains two spaces with an NQ name of "X", then the name "X" is ambiguous but "A\B\C\X" is not.
- They provide more efficient lookup operations in large trees because no searching is required.