Interesting ... but not really surprising ... students with some technical understanding sometimes like to 'mess with the system' ... but then again ... might really be un-intentional. Anyhoo ... the possible answer involves DB and locating the file in the sea of files uploaded to moodle in moodledata/filedir/.
select userid,contenthash,filename,filearea,filesize from mdl_files where filename like '%.docx' and filearea = 'submission_files' and userid = '9492';
where the userid is the id number of the student.
Hopefully, you will see something like this:
+--------+------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+------------------+----------+
| userid | contenthash | filename | filearea | filesize |
+--------+------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+------------------+----------+
| 9492 | 5883f23f43b5a29ca37ad66d02986b501d9dc655 | Reflection on Technical Writing #2.docx | submission_files | 7644 |
+--------+------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------+------------------+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
First, think I'd check out the file itself. Using example above:
Found in moodledata/filedir/58/83/ a file by the name of
5883f23f43b5a29ca37ad66d02986b501d9dc655
I would copy the 5883f23f43b5a29ca37ad66d02986b501d9dc655 file out to some other location and rename it on the fly ...
from moodledata/filedir/58/83/
cp 5883f23f43b5a29ca37ad66d02986b501d9dc655 /sometest/dir/test.docx
Scan test.docx
OR inspect it's contents ...
mv test.docx test.zip
unzip test.zip
A .docx is really a zip, BTW.
Just to see if there is anything else 'funny' contained in the doc.
If it's clean, use whatever tool you have to change the
filename column of that row (above) to a filename that doesn't contain any
'special characters' in it.
Then go back to Moodle interface to see if it shows with your change and
can be downloaded.
'spirit of sharing', Ken
