Understanding % Characters in Azure Blob File Names Using SQL OPENROWSET (BULK)

Why the % character is different In URL percent-encoding, the % character starts an encoded sequence. For example: %20 represents a space. %25 represents a literal % character. Because of this, file names that contain a literal % can behave differently from file names containing characters such as # , & , + , ; , = , or @ , depending on how the path is processed before blob lookup. Observed symptom The customer reported an import failure for a file name similar to: Company Data - Company Data - éêçëЮй_%25$£#.csv The error message started at the % sequence instead of showing the full file name: