[Closed] Searching Sharepoint 2013 for a file name that contains a space- help please!

Could this be moved to Chat please!

could try file%20name.xls where the %20 represents a space.

TBH I was always under the impression that Sharepoint was just for putting things into - I've never seen anyone get anything *out* of it before...

(and I used to be a Sharepoint developer...)

Rachel

I just checked and if you put the name in quotes, it worked for me

eg search on [b]"meeting notes"[/b] if the file is [b]meeting notes 2012.xls[/b] for example

I think 2013 supports regex searches so just try putting a space at the front of the name and enclosing the whole thing in inverted commas e.g. " leff*"

could be wrong though 🙁

edit: might not be wrong but definitely too slow

The problem is I don't know what the file name is that are saved under.
We had a staff memeber upload hundreds of files but they saved them in the wrong location.
I know all the files are 8 digits followed by a space, '01234567[space]'.

Any ideas any body? Would love to wrap this up before the weekend.

I just checked and if you put the name in quotes, it worked for me

❓

Do you know any of the content in the files themselves? If there are a series of words within the document, you can search for that too.
How recently did they save the files?
Do any of them appear in the users "5 most recent files?" - If so, you can clink the location folder and it will take you into the library.

Can you search for "* " (include the quotes)?
You could also try "\d+ " try with and without quotes no quotes this time if regular expressions are supported.
Also "\d+\s" may work.

I AM A REGEX NOVICE and I hate using them.

try searching for
[0-9]{8}\s
or
[0-9]{8}[ ]

Thanks for all the advice- sadly none of them are working.

The issue is that the 8 digit code is the unique ID of the document. Trying to find the numbers is impossible. Two users user one username and uploaded files over the last month- roughly 2000.
One user did it correctly, 8 digits and no space, whilst the second user did it incorrectly, 8 digits including a space at the end. The files are essentially lost in our library.

Search by date range e.g find file created on one particular day?

I can find all files uploaded by user ID 'x' between now and a month ago.
It gives me just over 2000 files. I now need to identify which ones contain a space in the file name. Sadly we don't have capacity to check every single file.

You can't do this with windows search even if you attached to the sharepoint repository with explorer. You'll have to script it with VB or Powershell. As it's sharepoint you'll probably have to run the script on the server itself.

<plug>We could sell you some software to find and categorize your documents for you</plug>

If you are desperate then it's possible to make a link to your Sharepoint store from MS Access and then query the document list that way. Then the search is quite easy. It takes less than a minute if you are used to Access

Thanks for the advice. I'll do some research on thee above.

There's probably a million better ways of doing it but I'll throw this into the ring as well...
Can you use Xplorer2 (a better file explorer than Microsoft baked into Windows, there are probably many other similar tools) to export the contents (ie file names, folder path, date modified etc) the folder(s) and dump the results into a text editor, then use Excels text to columns function to find all files with a space at position 9?

Oh, hang on, doesn't Sharepoint do something weird with filenames with a space in? I think all of ours end up with a "_" in and then it sticks the actual name in some metadata. Perhaps you could look for filenames with an underscore in?