The “_x0020_” of the Internal name for a SharePoint column

Question

I am currently doing documentation for our SharePoint Applications. For the purpose of explanation/definition, What is the "x0020" portion of a SharePoint internal name for a column?

I'm not sure if its an ascii or hex or whatever...is there a technical term for this type of internal name?

Answer 1

It's a variant of url encoding, specific to SharePoint, and it's been maddening SharePoint developers for years. It's generated by SharePoint when columns are created in the UI with spaces in their names. SharePoint field internal names cannot have spaces.

There's a workaround for this. It won't help for columns that already exist but when creating columns, create them with no spaces (ex, "BusinessUnit"), then edit the column to add the space. The internal name will remain as first created. Also you can control this if you create the field programmatically.

Answer 2

SharePoint indeed converts spaces to x0020 for internal names, because this is supposed to represent the url encode %20 (aka space). The “x0020” in the field name is the url encoded representation of the space in between of both words. To be more precise it is a form of unicode url encoding. The Unicode encoding of the space is “%u0020” but for fields “x0020” is required. To transform the encoded field name to a proper SharePoint internal field name we need to transform the encoded space somehow.

Answer 3

if you create a column with space you will end up with x0020 as internal name if you are using UI use ColumnName insted if you are using XML Column use internalName and staticName property

Answer 4

it's quite simple, if you use url encoding for the "space", you will have "%20" right? so when you create a column in SharePoint it will automatically replace the space by "x0020".