Advanced find name character limit?

I was wondering. Is there a reason for the character limit for the Name field in advanced view?
Currently it seems to be 259/260, even though it'd probably never be used for regular filenames because
simple view would be more suitable for that.

That's the length limit for a filename on Windows.

Yes, which is nice for the simple view and all.. Though, it doesn't really make sense for advanced view.

I'm not sure I understand your point. It's nothing to do with the simple/advanced find. Filenames can't be longer than 260 characters on Windows. Are you saying you need to be able to use a regex longer than 260 characters?

My point is that said field is more likely to be used for wildcards etc, so the limit for a single filename doesn't make sense in that context.

Say you have a list of filenames separated by "|" (w/o quotes).
Slicing and dicing said list of filenames to make it fit a single filename's character limit isn't really that fun.
(this is one of the uses said field is somewhat likely to be used for)

Edit: and yes, regular expressions would be another case.

I just had such a case where I wanted to match all filenames I had in a different folder, so I wen't with
(filename1|filename2|etc) to match them. I then had to slice and dice to make it fit said limit.

If you're using Advanced mode, you can have multiple Name clauses joined by And or Or logic (within a Subclause if you need to add additional conditions about things other than the Name).

That lets you do what you want there, and splitting the list of files up will probably end up being more readable than having one huge wildcard that goes off the side of the screen.

The Duplicate Finder may also be useful as an alternative. You can drop a list of files on that and tell it to search for other files with the same names.

Yes, correct..which is what I had to go with (hence, slice and dice), and readability doesn't really matter for a single use (or single occation) matching.

You probably know the problem I had. Alot of files, but some weren't supposed to be there, all of which were present in a couple of other folders.

Duplicate finder may have been of some use, but, I'm not sure how much.

In my opinion the filename character limit makes sense in the simple view, but needs to be removed in advanced view.

I usually use the things under Edit > Select Other for that kind of thing. Depends on how many folders are involved, but they can quickly pair up files that are (or aren't) in two folders.

Thanks for the tip (for a later date) :slight_smile:

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I'm not really familiar with this and am extremely unlikely to ever be affected by it, but (assuming I've even understood what is being said) I can sort of see the point that if the field can contain multiple filenames there may be no logical reason to limit the combined length of those names based on the maximum valid length of one name. Whether there is an implementation issue regarding providing a field of infinite length, I can't judge.

We could certainly change it, but the original question was "Is there a reason for the character limit" and that was the answer!

That is certainly true. (I kind of forgot in the heat of the moment.) It was the answer even though I still have trouble seeing why that would matter for the advanced name field.

If it is possible I really would like to see that limit removed in advanced mode.
It makes perfectly sense in simple mode though.

You can use wildcards in simple mode as well so really the mode is irrelevant. If anything it's less useful in advanced because as Leo said you can string multiple clauses together.

Yes, but there are cases where it would make some tasks harder to do. Such as stringing together lots of filenames separated by "|". You may remember all the features of DO on your fingertips, but most doesn't.

In those cases these simple but kind of stupid (when you know of better ones) solutions should be allowed to be done with as much ease as possible.

In the next update we'll bump this limit up to 1024.