Index
Access Special and illegal characters settings
Click Settings at the bottom of the left menu.
Select the Migration tab.
Scroll to the Special and illegal characters section.
Available options
Allow special characters
Toggle on to allow special characters to migrate.
Before using this feature
SharePoint Online (SharePoint for Microsoft 365) and SharePoint 2019 support the special characters # and %.
You have to activate special characters in SharePoint 2019 and Microsoft 365 for special characters to work. To activate this feature in your environment, you can follow these steps:
Install the SharePoint Online Management Shell.
Connect to SharePoint Online using Powershell.
Type the following command in PowerShell:
Set-SPOTenant -SpecialCharactersStateInFileFolderNames Allowed
Note: After you follow this procedure, it can take several hours for special characters to activate in your destination environment. You must run a migration to test if the feature is activated correctly. If you try to preserve these characters in an environment that does not allow it, you will receive an error during the migration.
Illegal characters replacements
In SharePoint, illegal characters are prohibited in site names, subsite names, group names, folder names, and document names.
ShareGate Migrate replaces these Illegal characters with an underscore when you copy, download, or modify SharePoint items.
To change the default replacement character, find the character you wish to replace and type the character you want to replace it within the Replacement field.
Note: "*", ":", "<", ">", "?", "/", "\", "|", and leading and trailing spaces in file and folder names are the only illegal characters in Microsoft 365. Since other characters are allowed, they are not changed during migration, even if you assign a replacement in your settings.