How to search a custom character in windows?

Question

My current Windows 7 is in English. I have some files transferred from another computer which contains non-english characters. Look at the picture below

Now, I want to delete them all. But writing this character in search box doesn't give the desired files.

How can I delete all the files which includes non-english/non-word characters?

Answer 1

Cihad, PowerShell is probably your best bet here.

I did a little test to find all non-English chars in a folder using the code below

Get-ChildItem c:\TurkishFileNames\ | where-object {$_.name -match "[^\x00-\x80]+"}

That returns all those non-english file names. You can then pass them to remove-item, but first establish that you are getting the correct names. One wrinkle here is you were talking about 'folder' names, and I tested this with file names.

Still, I believe you can use the same trick. If you have PowerShell 3.0 or 4.0 installed, you can use -directory to display only folder names when using Get-ChildItem:

Get-ChildItem c:\TurkishFolderNames\ -directory

The rest is going to be similar. You can download PowerShell 3.0 or 4.0 from Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34595 (WMF 3.0)

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40855 (WMF 4.0)

Windows 7 came with PowerShell 2.0, if you will stick with that you can still use the old syntax to get directories only:

Get-ChildItem C:\TurkishFolderNames\ | ? {$_.PsIsContainer -eq $true}

You can then proceed with the rest:

Get-ChildItem C:\TurkishFolderNames\ | ? {$_.PsIsContainer -eq $true} | ? {$_.name -match "[^\x00-\x80]+"}

Answer 2

As taken from my good friend Adam here: Can't search by dollar amounts that are in filename.

You may need to wrap your search in the following way:

~="searchterm"

Answer 3

A fast way to find files with a specific character is Powershell

dir D:\* -r -include *∓*

You can also use unicode notation: 0x2213 is equivalent to U+2213

$char = [char]0x2213
dir D:\* -r -include *$char*

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Btw. using the Windows search does give me correct result with your special characters!
Are you sure you haven't misconfigured something? (My config)