Forum Discussion
Use Unicode characters like Chinese / Arabic in file names
I'm working on a SharePoint 2010 DMS implementation, upgraded to SP2016 soon. There is a requirement to accept files with non-English characters, like Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. I thought this would be easy, as these characters are all unicode characters.
I can't find any documentation on this, but it appears that Chinese characters are rejected, SharePoint throws an error that the file name is empty or contains illegal characters. We only have English language pack installed but I don't believe installing all language packs will solve this? A language pack only adds resx files, right? Tested in both SP2010 and SP2016, same problem.
So question is: How to accept documents with any character in the file name?
1 Reply
As far as I know SharePoint supports unicode characters throughout the product. I don't know the official supportability story and I wasn't able to find comprehensive official documentation on unicode support. However, I've tested adding a file with Chinese characters in its name to Document Libraries in both SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2010 (without language packs installed). Uploading the file succeeded in both cases and the file name is rendered properly.
