# Search-UI - How to use special Chars like german Umlaute or Whitespaces for facet names?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-ui-how-to-use-special-chars-like-german-umlaute-or-whitespaces-for-facet-names/300150>\
**Category:** Elastic Search\
**Created:** [March 21, 2022, 4:22am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-ui-how-to-use-special-chars-like-german-umlaute-or-whitespaces-for-facet-names/300150 "2022-03-21T04:22:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![John\_Agricola](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/john_agricola/32/103226_2.png) [@John\_Agricola](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/John_Agricola)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2022, 4:22am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-ui-how-to-use-special-chars-like-german-umlaute-or-whitespaces-for-facet-names/300150/1 "2022-03-21T04:22:21Z")

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Hi everyone,

I have been playing with enterprise search and search UI. I use a JSON file to upload the data.

For the values, it looks fine - but for the Keys which are then converted to the names of the facets, I can't use whitespace, special chars like 'ä' etc...

That would kinda limit the use of the facets - What is the correct way to do it?

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**Author:** ![casey](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/casey/32/68371_2.png) [@casey](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/casey)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2022, 2:42pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-ui-how-to-use-special-chars-like-german-umlaute-or-whitespaces-for-facet-names/300150/2 "2022-03-21T14:42:27Z")

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Hi John! Thanks for joining the community and for asking a great first question!

Facet names (or keys) are indeed limited in the characters that can be used: [Schema API | Elastic App Search Documentation [8.1] | Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/schema.html#schema-errors:~:text=Name%20can%20only%20contain%20lowercase%20letters%2C%20numbers%2C%20and%20underscores)

The limitations include:

- alphanumeric characters and underscores
- cannot start with an underscore
- cannot contain whitespace

As for rendering the "correct" keys within Search UI, customizing the code to replace the character-limited field names with their corrected counterparts is likely the best path.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![John\_Agricola](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/john_agricola/32/103226_2.png) [@John\_Agricola](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/John_Agricola)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2022, 3:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-ui-how-to-use-special-chars-like-german-umlaute-or-whitespaces-for-facet-names/300150/3 "2022-03-21T15:15:12Z")

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Thx for the fast reply.. So we will need a config file, which is fine 🙂

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [November 4, 2022, 8:34am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/search-ui-how-to-use-special-chars-like-german-umlaute-or-whitespaces-for-facet-names/300150/4 "2022-11-04T08:34:45Z")

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