17 November 2005

Validating Sharepoint filenames on upload

Some characters are legal for FAT or NTFS files but illegal for files in Sharepoint documentlibraries. Using the regular upload UI for Sharepoint you'll encounter a rather unpleasant validation error when uploading a file with funky characters. Using the object model will give you a good ole' exception.

I've seen a lot of approaches to solving this problem, and implemented a couple myself. Last night I noticed a method on the SPEncode static class that enabled a clean approach to the problem (updated for double punctuation mark problem):

private string CleanForUrlAndFileNameUse(string dirtyFileName)

{

    char[] dirtyChars = dirtyFileName.ToCharArray();

    foreach (char c in dirtyChars)

    {

        if (!SPEncode.IsLegalCharInUrl(c))

        {

            dirtyFileName = dirtyFileName.Replace(c.ToString(), "");

        }

    }

   

    // Spaces are not appreciated

    dirtyFileName = dirtyFileName.Replace(" ", "");

   

    // double punctuation marks causes validation error

    while(dirtyFileName.IndexOf("..") != -1)

        dirtyFileName = dirtyFileName.Replace("..", ".");

 

    return dirtyFileName; // now clean:-)

}

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Comments

# Angus Logan said:

Hey Mads - Nice one!

Wanna wrap it up in a console app which cleans entire directories?

Thursday, November 17, 2005 5:40 AM
# Mirrored Blogs said:

I've developed various solutions to this in various SharePoint projects, but I found a nice neat

Friday, August 17, 2007 4:05 PM
# deepmala said:

Hi Mads,

i have a requirement of searching the file in a document library on the basis of File Name and Type, here Type will define its extension.

any help would be appreciated.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 2:56 AM
# Rabbit66 said:

Where would I add this code? Not a programmer?

Wednesday, October 17, 2007 4:14 PM
# Frank said:

SharePoint vs. File Shares

Of corse file shares!

Tuesday, September 09, 2008 6:08 PM
# devendra said:

Where i have to place this code

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# Manitra said:

Hello,

Thanks for this tip. I would suggest a small enhancement to drastically increase the speed and reduce the memory consumption :

   // has a N complexity instead of N^2 for your implementation (N being the number of char)

   //moreover, memory consumption is reduced

   var result = new StringBuilder(dirtyFileName.Length);

   foreach (var c in dirtyFileName.ToCharArray())

       if (!SPEncode.IsLegalCharInUrl(c))

           result.Append(c);

   return result.ToString();

I hope this would be usefull.

Manitra.

Thursday, June 03, 2010 8:12 AM