Recently, I’ve got a question about file naming conventions versus Search: which characters can be really used as word breakers, eg. replacing spaces in file names (see Susan Hanley’s great post about the file naming conventions here).
For example, let’s say you have a file with name “My Cool Test Document.docx”. If you store this document in a file share or upload to SharePoint and index it, you’ll be able to search for the words “cool” or “Test” or “Document”, and you’ll see this document on the result set.
Anyway, using this file name in SharePoint document libraries will give you the crazy “%20” characters in the URL (see Susan’s post, again).
If we simple eliminate the spaces and uses plain camel case in the file name (MyCoolTestDocument.docx), we won’t get the “%20″s but the search engine will not be able to separate the words.
The third option is, of course, using some other character instead of spaces, for example underscore, like My_Cool_Test_Document.docx.
Well, I have started to make some research and found that this area is not really well documented, so that I decided to make some tests by myself. I created some “lorem ipsum” documents with different names, including several special character for replacing space.
SharePoint versions I tested against
MOSS 2007 Enterprise
SP 2010 Enterprise, no FAST
FS4SP
SP2013 Enterprise
O365
Content sources:
File share
SharePoint document library
Characters used in file names: “-“, “_”, “.”, “&”, “%”, “+”, “#”
The results are absolutely consistent with Susan’s recommendations:
Click here to find out the results>>
Check out our resource centre for more SharePoint content from Agnes Molnar and other SharePoint specialists!
