Find Special Characters in File Names

Find Special Characters in File Names

Cleanup ⚡ tab → Project Analysis group

Find files and folders in your Flare project whose names contain characters that cause trouble in web output or on non-Windows hosting — before your readers find them as broken or ugly links.

Flare builds most of these names without complaint, so the problems only surface later: %20 soup in URLs, links that die at a #, or files that will not deploy to a Linux web server.

What it finds

Every folder and file name in the project (Content and Project folders; build output, backups, and Flare's internal folders are skipped) is checked for:

• Spaces — become %20 in URLs (Medium)
• Non-ASCII characters — umlauts, diacritics, and anything outside plain ASCII gets percent-encoded and can break on non-Windows hosting (Medium)
• URL-unsafe punctuation — # % & + ' , ; ( ) [ ] { } @ ! $ = ^ ~ and backtick. # and % are rated High because they actively break links; the rest need escaping (Medium)
• Characters illegal on Windows — < > : " | ? *, control characters, and zero-width characters (High)
• Leading or trailing spaces and dots — silently stripped or rejected by many tools (High)
• Reserved DOS device names — CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1–COM9, LPT1–LPT9, with or without extension (High)

Folder names are checked as thoroughly as file names — a folder called User Guide puts a %20 in every URL below it.

How to use it

1. Open your project.
2. On the Cleanup ⚡ tab, in the Project Analysis group, click Find Special Characters in File Names.
3. Review the results grid: relative path, the offending path segment, the characters found, category, and severity.
4. Click a column header to sort; double-click a row to open the file in Flare.

Notes

• The tool is report-only. Renaming files by hand in Flare's Content Explorer keeps links intact — rename the worst offenders first (High severity).
• The same checks also run as rules I.09–I.11 in Flare Diagnosis, so they are included in your project's overall health report.
• Severity is High/Medium rather than Critical because Flare URL-encodes names at build time — these names hurt SEO, portability, and link hygiene rather than breaking the build outright.