Cannot be Compressed because it includes characters that cannot be used, but I don't have any files with special characters

enter image description here

So I'm trying to compress some documents I made when I get the following error message: I have no idea what the character is, as it just looks like a blank space. I have removed the blank spaces from my documents and it still won't let me zip it. Online answers seem to refer to needing the change the language setting on my computer, but I haven't written any foreign languages. Any help would be appreciated.

asked May 6, 2022 at 21:39 David 54321 David 54321 696 2 2 gold badges 11 11 silver badges 24 24 bronze badges

Creating a compressed .zip archive using Windows Explorer can cause this error. See this question on Super User for help: superuser.com/q/476740/90668

Commented Apr 6, 2023 at 14:42

4 Answers 4

PowerShell worked around around this glitch for me, eg to zip up C:\TEMP\folder

Compress-Archive C:\TEMP\folder\ -DestinationPath c:\temp\folder.zip

answered Dec 11, 2023 at 4:59 1,622 21 21 silver badges 15 15 bronze badges

Go to Users directory and make a new directory called 'Analytics', Then, move you 'Account_Over_Time_Analysis' to this folder and try to comporess again. If it fails again, please try 7zip incase your using something else.

Such an error could be caused from different language dir-name, a name with spaces or a name with escape chars.

answered May 6, 2022 at 21:42 HindicatoR HindicatoR 145 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges

this worked, thank you! I actually took all the sub files and folder and put them in analytics on a path close to the c drive and that may have helped. Thanks for your advice.

Commented May 10, 2022 at 18:24

So weird tho, first time that I encountered this. Only 7zip worked. Copying to folder into another one didnt do the trick for me. Thanks.

Commented Mar 1, 2023 at 14:54

To fix this you could hunt around for the correct language pack, or just install 7-Zip and use that to zip the files instead

answered Aug 30, 2022 at 8:14 Abdalhameed Saad Abdalhameed Saad 29 1 1 bronze badge

Just discovered a similar issue with fciv not liking certain filenames. I solved it by copying the filename into notepad, then copying the filename text from notepad to rename the file. While I couldn't see any difference, fciv then "liked" the name.

Oddly, my backup tools didn't mind the names as they were. I suspect there was some odd unicode/non-unicode text in the name because the files causing problems were sourced via the web.

One other problem was a folder of a saved web page into from a receipt that had software keys I wanted to keep. It had a mess of issues and a simple rename wasn't an option, and even compression wasn't an option, so I printed it to a PDF and deleted the fouled up folder.