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Recently I moved to a new server after the old one had died. I had wordpress installation there, powered by Apache2 and Gentoo Linux. When moving, I decided to use nginx and Debian instead. I brought my wordpress back to work and everything would be fine if not for one little...

Problem

Images that contain special characters in the filenames don't load, I get 404 Not Found. For instance when requesting

http://my_site/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Zajęcia-dla-dorosłych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg

wordpress responds

You tried going to http://my_site/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Zaj%C4%99cia-dla-doros%C5%82ych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg, and it doesn't exist.

I played a while with the terminal and discovered that image filenames on the server differ a little bit from those requested by the wordpress. Despite they look identically, special character sequences are encoded in a different way. For example, when I copy filename Zajęcia-dla-dorosłych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg from terminal it is encoded as Zajęcia-dla-dorosłych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg. On the other hand, wordpress is looking for file Zajęcia-dla-dorosłych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg which doesn't exist, of course.

Both systems (the old Gentoo and the current Debian) are set to use UTF-8-based locale.

How to solve?

I think about three possible reasons:

  • Debian stores special characters in filenames differently than Gentoo
  • my new mysql stores special characters differently than the old one
  • nginx handles special characters differently than Apache

Any suggestions how to falsificate those hypothesis and, finally, solve the problem?

Mikołaj Pastuszko
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1 Answers1

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Ok, I solved the problem by correcting the filenames with a script. I think the encoding of special characters was broken at some point when I was copying the files between systems (Gentoo => Mac OS X => Debian). Feel free to use and edit my script it you have similar problem.

Mikołaj Pastuszko
  • 31
  • 5