Thinking out aloud - Dave Hunter's SharePoint Blog

Most developers who have experience of SharePoint will know that when naming columns using the user interface will result in the actual column name will be an escaped version of what the user entered as the column name. The most common replacement is a space is replaced with "_x0020_". For example: A user enters "Published Date". The display name will remain as "Published Date" but the underlying name of the column will be "Published_x0020_Date".

The table below lists some of the commonly replaced characters

However there is another way, .NET has a method called EncodeName, which is part of the System.Xml namespace. You can use this method to take in a string that needs to be escaped and returns the escaped string based on the input. For example:

 
using System.Xml; 


// encode the column name 
string escapedString = XmlConvert.EncodeName("Published Date"); 

 
// decode the escaped column name  
string normalString = XmlConvert.DecodeName(escapedString); 

For more information about EncodeName please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmlconvert.encodename.aspx. Also note that there is a DecodeName method that does the reverse.

One way to get around the escaping is to name a column without spaces or special characters, save the changes and then go back into the column and rename with your desired name. The result is that the name specified first is used for the column name and the latter just changes the display name.

Hope this helps