Searching for the file that won’t be found

Searching for a file with a distinctive word in its name should be straightforward, but here I show some weird problems that could catch you out. I’m very grateful to Sam for drawing my attention to this, and welcome all and any rational explanations of what’s going on.

In some accounts of ancient Greek mythology, Cleta (Κλήτα) was one of the two Charites or Graces, alongside Phaenna. Her name apparently means renowned, and is still occasionally used as a first name today. It’s not the sort of word that should give Spotlight any cause for concern, and should prove easy to find.

Demonstration

To see the problems it can cause, create a folder somewhere accessible, in ~/Documents perhaps, and create half a dozen files with the names shown below.

Now open a new Finder window, and set it to Find mode using that command at the foot of the File menu. Then type into its search box the letters cleta

Only four of the files in that folder are found, excluding the first two, despite the fact that all their names clearly contain the search term.

Now clear the search box, and in the search criterion below, set it to find Name contains cleta, which you might have thought would be the same as the previous search.

Now all six files are found successfully.

You can try other variations of the file name to see which can be found using the search box, and which remain hidden. For example,
1995z_spectacletable_01.txt
also appears susceptible to this problem, suggesting that other examples might have the form
[digits]_[chars]cleta[chars]_[digits].[extension]

Separators

There are some other oddities at work as well, that you can see in the four file names that haven’t yet played hide and seek. So far I’ve been using Spotlight to find file names that simply contain the characters cleta. Now extend that to cletapainting

While you would expect the second of those to appear, Spotlight has elided the hyphen embedded in the first, as if it wasn’t there. Although Spotlight doesn’t provide a simple way to search for discrete words in file names, that’s a feature readily accessible in several third-party search utilities, including Find Any File and HoudahSpot. If you use Spotlight much, both of those are essentials, and you may wish to add Alfred as well.

As expected, Find Any File has no problems in finding all six test files when looking for names containing cleta

Set it to find names containing the word cleta, though, and it recognises spaces, hyphens and underscore _ characters as word separators, but doesn’t oblige with CamelCase, whether or not you capitalise its initial character.

Conclusions

Avoid using the characters cleta in file names, as they can confuse Spotlight.
Leave the search box in the Finder’s Find window empty and construct your search in the lower search bars instead.
Spotlight can overlook hyphens in file names, but does treat them as word separators.
Searching for words in file names can treat spaces, hyphens and underscore _ characters as word separators, but can’t cope with CamelCase.
Spotlight’s rules are largely unwritten. Apple’s brief account is here, and doesn’t even mention the name Cleta.

My thanks again to Sam for providing me with the example of cleta that made this possible if apparently highly improbable.