{"id":12213,"date":"2010-11-24T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2010\/11\/24\/you-can-filter-the-common-file-dialog-with-wildcards\/"},"modified":"2010-11-24T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-24T07:00:00","slug":"you-can-filter-the-common-file-dialog-with-wildcards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20101124-00\/?p=12213","title":{"rendered":"You can filter the Common File dialog with wildcards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A customer reported an apparent inconsistency in the shell common file dialogs:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> The question mark appears to be treated differently from other invalid file name characters. I tried to save a file in Paint under the name <code>?.jpg<\/code> but instead of telling me that I had an invalid character in the file name (as it does with other characters like <code>\/<\/code> <code>&lt;<\/code> and <code>|<\/code>) or navigating to a new folder (like <code>\\<\/code> or <code>*<\/code>), it appears to do nothing. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> Actually, it did do something. You just couldn&#8217;t tell because the result of that something was the same as doing nothing.\n If you type a wildcard like <code>?<\/code> or <code>*<\/code> into a common file dialog, the dialog interprets this as a request to filter the list of files to those which match the wildcard you specify. In this particular example, typing <code>?.jpg<\/code> says &#8220;Show me all the single-character files with the <code>.jpg<\/code> extension.&#8221; From the description in the original report, I gather that the customer&#8217;s tests took place in an empty directory (so the filter had no effect).<\/p>\n<p> The customer responded with muted surprise. <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p> Hmmmmm&#8230;..interesting. I hadn&#8217;t realized you can type in your own filter in dialog boxes. How long has this feature existed? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> The ability to filter the common file dialog has been around since the dialogs were introduced in Windows&nbsp;3.1. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A customer reported an apparent inconsistency in the shell common file dialogs: The question mark appears to be treated differently from other invalid file name characters. I tried to save a file in Paint under the name ?.jpg but instead of telling me that I had an invalid character in the file name (as it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-12213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>A customer reported an apparent inconsistency in the shell common file dialogs: The question mark appears to be treated differently from other invalid file name characters. I tried to save a file in Paint under the name ?.jpg but instead of telling me that I had an invalid character in the file name (as it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}