"Keep Particular Characters" - can I run on entire drive?

[marvin_rock]

Title sums it up pretty well, I want to run the "Keep Particular Characters" over an entire drive (a few million files), currently I'm doing a *.* search on each folder, then selecting all files, then doing it that way. Is there a quicker way of doing it?

[marvin_rock]

Or possibly just run a search that shows me any files that have characters OTHER than "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789 _-.()"

[admin]

Just a quick shot: Try this search pattern, and ensure that this ticked: Configuration > Find Files & Branch View > Find Files > Enable extended pattern matching

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*[!a-zA-Z0-9 ._()-]*

[marvin_rock]

Just a quick shot: Try this search pattern, and ensure that this ticked: Configuration > Find Files & Branch View > Find Files > Enable extended pattern matching

Code: Select all

*[!a-zA-Z0-9 ._()-]*

This seems to be working. I couldn't find that setting specifically, but it seems to be doing the trick, can you explain how that search patter works? Also, is there any way to add "&" into the search, I appear to be getting most of my hits from that symbol, which is okay for what I'm trying to do.

[admin]

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*[!a-zA-Z0-9 ._()&-]*

The hyphen (-) should be the last in the list between [ and ].

[...] specifies a list of characters
! at the beginning means NOT
a-z = abcdef...z
A-Z = ABCDEF...Z
* is the usual wildcard

The whole means: Match any string that contains anywhere a char that is not in the list "a-zA-Z0-9 ._()&-".

[marvin_rock]

Working perfect! Thanks!!!

[Marco]

Or, you can try this regex pattern:

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[^\w \-.()]

where

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[  opens the character class
^  negates the content
\w the ASCII characters [A-Za-z0-9_], notice the inclusion of the underscore and digits
   the space
\- the hyphen, escaped
.  the dot
() the parentheses
]  closes the character class