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What happens if you deactivate the Clean Image Filenames plugin and upload the same file?

Then it works.

I uploaded the same file (with a filename that contained a Swedish “?”) four times, alternating the activation of Clean Image Filenames. Both times it was active I got the same result.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I’ve already uploaded the file before trying Clean Image Filenames? Is WordPress smart enough to try to use the previous image? I’ll investigate… ??

No, WordPress will upload the file as a new one and rename the filename adding 1 at the end and the Clean Image Filenames plugin takes this into consideration.

Ah, I see that now.

My file name was File Name test – a?a?O?.jpg and the images on the server becomes file-name-test-a%cc%8aa%cc%88o%cc%88.jpg which results in a 404 when I try to access it.

I’d rather see that the file name was transliterated to File Name test – aaO.jpg (or even better, file-name-test---aao.jpg).

The plugin is supposed to translate the filenames into aao not a%cc%8aa%cc%88o%cc%88 or anything like that. It uses a core WordPress function, called sanitize_title(), to do the translation. It’s the same function that translates a post title into the slug.

Are you running your own server or where are you hosting the site?

Yeah, I guessed it was supposed to work like that. I’ve tried other plugins (Clean Filenames, Filenames to latin) and had problems with them as well. So maybe it has something to do with my setup. My site is hosted at a Swedish web hosting company (https://fsdata.se/) but not open to the public (just a test site).

Alright, might be some missing locales on the server or something like that.

Maybe… if I run locale -a on the server I do get a lot of locales, like sv_SE and sv_SE.utf8. But I’m not completely familiar with this, maybe that doesn’t mean they are available for PHP?

It’s odd though, if I just use the clean_filename() function from the plugin (like, in a template) and run it like this:

function clean_filename($file) {

	$path = pathinfo($file['name']);
	$new_filename = preg_replace('/.' . $path['extension'] . '$/', '', $file['name']);
	$file['name'] = sanitize_title($new_filename) . '.' . $path['extension'];

	return $file;
}

$file = clean_filename( array( "name" => "Test av filnamn – ???.jpg" ) );
echo $file[ 'name' ];

The output is the expected test-av-filnamn-aao.jpg.

So it seems like files in my Finder (OS X) uses odd characters (multibyte?) even though it looks like ???. Maybe it’s actually something related to the file names on my computer and has nothing to do with WordPress, plugins or server environment at all. Very weird.

Anyway, sorry to bother, and thanks for the quick feedback!

I’m gonna mark this as resolved since I don’t think it’s anything wrong with this plugin.

No worries! Glad to help!

Actually it is only present in Firefox. Works as expected in both Safari and Chrome.

If I understand it correctly then other browsers are handling OS X filenames characters in a different way. I found this for example: Unconventional normalization form for uploaded filename on OSX.

So, that was my afternoon… :/

Anyway, I’ve now learned that filename cleaning of characters like ??? won’t work if files are uploaded with Firefox on OS X. (Not even the postprocessing in Media File Renamer worked on these files.)

I’m curious though if it would be possible to handle this in code in a plugin, but the world of character encoding is a world I rather stay away from… ??