So, I was trying to use Sitecore Serialisation, and I got the following error:

System.ArgumentException: Illegal characters in path.
at System.IO.Path.CheckInvalidPathChars(String path, Boolean checkAdditional)
at System.IO.Path.IsPathRooted(String path)
at Sitecore.Data.Serialization.PathUtils.MapItemPath(String itemPath, String root)

Joy. Sadly, this pad doesn’t give a clue what the problem item actually is. The log files don’t show an exception – but I can see the last item processed, and it looks funny:

So, if that’s the item throwing the exception then a) serialisation isn’t logging the exception, which sucks, and b) some items in this tree have newline or carriage return characters (\n or \r)

To try and find these, I ran SQL against the database…

SELECT * FROM [MASTER].[dbo].[Items]
where Name like '%' + CHAR(10) + '%'
or Name like '%' + CHAR(13) + '%'

This found a bunch of items with \r in their names. Lord knows how they were put there. I suspect copy and paste from some of the actual content.