Windows 7 search for special characters

Tuesday, November 22, PM. I'm also looking for a solution for this problem! Any clue!? Thursday, January 5, AM. This should help from a thread on answers. Is it a Regular Expression? I have a rather large source code repository on my machine; it is not indexed by Windows Search.

I am trying to find some oddly-named generated files of the form. On Windows XP I could find these files by searching for. So my question is this: is it possible to find files named like that using the built-in Windows 7 search functionality?

I did find this question which is very similar, but the answer doesn't work for me; it seems like any special character I put in the query is either ignored or treated as a wildcard, and as a result it matches every single file and directory. Is there perhaps some registry value I can set to make the search-by-filename feature work with special characters? Doh, I stumbled upon the answer after consulting the Advanced Query Syntax reference again.

Searching for filename:. I think the other answerer might have gotten this backwards. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Other non-string properties Dates, etc. Second, if you are searching in any indexed location, then all non-indexed locations in your query will not be shown.

Well, unquoted is a grouping operator for when you use AND or OR , you grouped nothing, so Windows thinks you meant group nothing search everything. Anyways, in this case you wild card a group of nothing, so Windows searches for all groups of nothing or everything! This searches for words that start with , but since words are not it only searches for properties that are just. This didn't work, windows seems to not find anything if the amount of searching is too intensive.

Essentially find a filename that contains just a somewhere. It broadens the search considerably and the results may no longer be desireable.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Windows 7 search for file with a special character in the file name? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 5 months ago. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Special characters also known as diacritical marks may be more common in certain languages, but there are plenty of circumstances in which English speakers may need to use them.

But because they are so rare in English, native English speakers may not have learned how to add those marks to documents, emails, or other writings. In fact, once upon a time, you would have had to look up the symbol character codes The easiest way to add diacritical marks to a document is to enable the Windows touch keyboard.

This is how you get it:. You can see which one is active in the lower-right side of your taskbar, near the date. Washington State University has published a useful chart showing all of the symbols you can get using the US International Keyboard. If you use a few special characters consistently, it can be faster to simply add the character you want using your keyboard.

There are several ways to do this; here are two of the easiest each of which has its limitations :.