Default space character for web safe URL

Heya,

Just came across this answer and decided to write some general guidelines for anyone who comes across this in the future despite the old question.

Unfortunately, there’s no current way in Spaces to change the encoding from %20 back to +. This behavior is hard-coded into the system. It’s generally recommended as per URL encoding rules to use %20 for space characters in URLs.

Beyond manually changing the URLs stored in your database (which can be risky), you might consider using a script to pull down, rename, and re-upload your files. Ensure you have proper backups and you’ve tested this on non-production data before you proceed with any mass-renaming operations.

A possible solution can be to write code to fetch the file from Spaces and serve it through a PHP script (adjust according to your application language) where it’s URL decoded before it’s sent. Here’s a rough example of how to do it:

<?php
$file = 'path/to/spaces/file.pdf';
$decodedFile = urldecode($file);
header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: Binary");
header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=\"" . basename($decodedFile) . "\"");
readfile($file);
?>

Please remember to replace ‘path/to/spaces/file.pdf’ with the path to your file in Spaces.

While this solution is more of a workaround, it should allow your client to use filenames with spaces without requiring modification of the WordPress data.

For more information on working with Spaces, you can refer to our DigitalOcean Spaces documentation.

Hope that this helps!